Website and Internet Marketing Basics
July 10, 2008
Your first steps in starting your Internet marketing campaign sound simple, but will require an investment of your time:
Decide what you want your campaign to accomplish
Establish a budget
Formulate a game plan
These steps conform with the basic but critical “secret” to Internet success. Remember, strategy is key. You are headed into unfamiliar territory, and without a map, you’ll probably get lost!
Your Goals
What do you want your website to accomplish? You may want visitors to buy products or services directly from your website, or you may only want to provide more information about your brick-and-mortar company and give your customers a place to learn about sales, special offers, business hours, and other information. Your first step is to determine your goals for your website, and plan to design it accordingly.
Research: Plan to spend a lot of time researching information, both for your company and about your competitors. The more you know about the competition, the better equipped you will be to offer something unique. Internet users typically make Internet purchases for one of the following reasons:
They recognize the name (branding)
The process is convenient and the deal is better than other companies offering the same product or service
They can’t get the particular product or service elsewhere
If you can offer something unique and original, even a new spin on an old product or service, you can succeed online. With good advertising practices, you can also be successful with not-so-unusual products by increasing your visibility and offering better deals than your competitors.
Your Budget
Money makes the Internet go ’round
Though it is true that you can start an Internet business with little or no initial investment, you should expect at some point to establish a realistic and firm budget. At the very least, plan to reinvest some of your profits in your company.
Also, having a small initial advertising budget can help get things moving faster. Once you have your website set up to take in profits, you might want to consider advertising in a few low-cost “traditional” ways to start attracting visitors. These traditional advertising methods include:
- Flyers
- Post cards
- Direct response mail
- E-mail blasts
- Fax blasts
- Yellow pages
- Newspaper ads
- Magazine ads
- Billboards
- Radio commercials
- Television commercials
- Social Networking
Of course, some of these avenues are more expensive than others. You can also start with low-cost or free online advertisements, and consider placing more traditional ads when you have some profits to roll back into your budget.
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[...] Denise wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptYour first steps in starting your Internet marketing campaign sound simple, but will require an investment of your time:. Decide what you want your campaign to accomplish Establish a budget Formulate a game plan … [...]
[...] Website and Internet <b>Marketing</b> Basics Your first steps in starting your Internet <b>marketing</b> campaign sound simple, but will require an investment of your time:. Decide what you want your campaign to accomplish Establish a budget Formulate a game plan <b>…</b> [...]