Today's buyers have increased expectations about the information they expect to be available to them. People tend to buy from companies with web sites that are easy to find (search engine friendly), easy to navigate, have information-rich content, enable them to proceed at their own pace and respect their privacy. Internet marketing and promotion helps develop a web presence that supports your selling process.
Internet Marketing is a progression of steps for attracting/qualifying a prospect by capitalizing on the power of the web. This section shows you how to create an Internet presence that becomes your most effective sales tool for making sensible investments in Internet marketing.
Search engines are the primary means through which Internet users find web sites. That's why a web site with good search engine positioning may see a dramatic increase in traffic. Millions of searches are initiated every day through search engines for locating information or suppliers of goods and services. You know that the Internet is a great medium to expand your business across geographic frontiers and to let the world know about your unique offering. How do you let the world know? A search engine is the most effective tool that can bring a prospective customer to your subscription website. While online advertising and promotion and lead generation campaigns are also important techniques to acquire new visitors to your site, the investment required for getting traffic through search engines is much lower.
How do Search Engines work?Most of the top-ranked search engines are crawler based search engines while some may be based on human compiled directories. Search engines are primarily composed of three parts.
A search engine robot’s action is called spidering, as it resembles the multiple legged spider. The spider’s job is to go to a web page, read the contents, connect to any other pages on that web site through links, and bring back the information. From one page it will travel to several pages and this proliferation follows several parallel and nested paths simultaneously. Spiders frequent the site at some interval, may be a month to a few months, and re-index the pages.
The spider’s movement across web pages stores those pages in its memory, but the key action is in indexing. The index is a huge database containing all the information brought back by the spider. The index is constantly being updated as the spider collects more information. The entire page is not indexed and the searching and page-ranking algorithm is applied only to the index that has been created. Most search engines claim that they index the full visible body text of a page
The search engine software or program is the final part. When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the search engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first. The algorithm-based processes used to determine ranking of results are discussed in greater detail later.
Search engines rank web pages according to the software’s understanding of the web page’s relevancy to the term being searched. To determine relevancy, each search engine follows its own group of rules. The most important rules are
• The location of keywords on your web page; and• How often those keywords appear on the page (the frequency)
For example, if the keyword appears in the title of the page, then it would be considered to be far more relevant than the keyword appearing in the text at the bottom of the page.
Search engines consider keywords to be more relevant if they appear sooner on the page (like in the headline) rather than later. The idea is that you’ll be putting the most important words – the ones that really have the relevant information – on the page first.
Search engines also consider the frequency with which keywords appear. The frequency is usually determined by how often the keywords are used out of all the words on a page. If the keyword is used 4 times out of 100 words, the frequency would be 4%.
Of course, you can now develop the perfect relevant page with one keyword at 100% frequency - just put a single word on the page and make it the title of the page as well. Unfortunately, the search engines don’t make things that simple. Moreover, what good will it do if visitors arrive at your page and find just one word!
While all search engines do follow the same basic rules of relevancy, location and frequency, each search engine has its own special way of determining rankings. To make things more interesting, the search engines change the rules from time to time so that the rankings change even if the web pages have remained the same.
A majority of search engines charge a fee for submission. There are also some good search engines that allow you to submit your site for free. Although, listing of your website is not guaranteed through free submission, it is always recommended that you submit your website to a search engine with free submission.
Free listing is available with some major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and WebCrawler. As stated earlier, even after submission of your website, a listing is not guaranteed. Generally, it takes up to 2 to 3 months to be listed after submission. A recent research concluded that the audience potential for websites submitted through free search engines is about 39%.
Most search engines charge a nominal fee for every URL submitted. You are more likely to get favorable results by submitting your website to a search engine with paid inclusion. AskJeeves, Inktomi, AOL, and LookSmart are the most popular search engines in this category. Once you submit your website with these Search Engines, your website is most likely to be listed within a week. The audience potential for paid search engines is 100%.
Thus, while it is possible to submit your URL to search engines for free, you have to keep in mind that there are premium programs offered by some search engines that assure listing or provide better positioning in ranking. Some use of paid listing programs is recommended if you wish to receive serious traffic on your website from the search engine.
Paid listing programs are explained later in this section. Free submission could result in much lower traffic, a low rank and positioning amongst the results returned, and longer period of time before your website actually shows up in the results returned by the search engine. To avoid these issues some search engines offer “paid participation” that guarantees high traffic and ranking for a fixed fee per year.
There are two methods of submitting your URL to Search Engines. One is to use Search Engine Submission services such as “Submit it”, which is a part of MSN Central. The fee for submitting URLs using this service ranges from $79 to $299 per year. Another is to submit your URL by submitting it individually to popular Search Engines by going to the Submit URL page for the search engine and thus avoiding the fee charged by submission services.
How much would you like to spend on this exercise? If the budget is limited, options such as some of the paid programs, advertisements, expensive directory listings will have to be forsaken and attention given to getting the best results from limited but focused efforts.
The key is to strike a balance between free and paid programs that yield maximum return on investment (ROI). You should submit your website to all the free search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and WebCrawler, at least one paid search engine such as Inktomi ($89 for submission of 3 URLs), and Yahoo Directory ($299 a year). Apart from these, you should think of submitting your website to a couple of “paid participation” or “paid placement” programs such as Google Adwords and Overture, which are discussed later.
Search engines generally list pages of ten to twenty results per page. Most search items will return thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of results. The key, however, is to get listed amongst the top results if you expect to get any traffic through these search engine results.
Your "link popularity" is simply a count of the number of web pages that are linked to you. Improving your website’s link popularity is absolutely vital for improving the visibility of your website. You may want to know your link popularity for two reasons. The first is that your link popularity will improve your ranking on all crawler search engines. As discussed earlier, all crawler-based search engines have a component called the spider, which crawls from one webpage to another through links. Hence, more the websites linking to your website, the better are your chances of getting listed through a search engine. The second reason is that you might want to know which websites are linked to you and are potentially referring traffic.
Search engines give sites with good inbound and outbound links a higher ranking. The logic goes that if you provide outbound links to other material you are providing a valuable service: and, if other sites link to you then you must have content of value.
The best way to discover how people are finding your web site is to analyze your site's activity logs. If you are unable to analyze these logs, you can instead use search engines to track down referral links. In particular, this method gives you an idea of how "popular" a search engine believes your site to be. Be aware that "popularity" is only one part of the link analysis systems that search engines such as Google use to rank web pages. The quality and context of links is also taken into account, rather than sheer numbers.
You can use link:‘site URL’ feature of many search engines to list all the pages that link to your site, and that too in order of Page Rank. For Google, North Light and AltaVista, use link:xxyyzz.com to find the listing of pages that link to your web site www.xxyyzz.com For Alltheweb use link.all instead of link and for Inktomi use ‘linkdomain’ instead of ‘link’ in the above example. The results would be a list of all pages (if indexed by the search engine) that link to your target site, listed in the order of popularity.
If you need to find the link to specific pages instead of to an entire site, then the above link: feature will not work. Use the Advanced search features offered by HotBot and MSN Search, enter the full URL of the target page including http:// and use the option “links to URL” or similar.
Some sites offer to run comparison of the links to a chosen site vis-à-vis three other chosen sites. http://linkpop.marketleap.com and
http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com are two such sites where you could submit your target URL and three other URLs that you wish to have a comparison done. www.linkpopularity.com is a site that will analyze the link popularity of a chosen URL in three prominent search engines.
Link analysis is somewhat different than measuring link popularity. While link popularity is generally used to measure the number of pages that link to a particular site, link analysis will go beyond this and analyze the popularity of the pages that link to your pages. In a way link analysis is a chain analysis system that accords weighting to every page that links to the target site, with weights determined by the popularity of those pages. Search engines use link analysis in their page-ranking algorithm. Search engines also try to determine the context of those links, in other words, how closely those links relate to the search string. For example if the search string was “toys”, and if there were links from other sites that either had the word toys within the link or in close proximity of the link, the ranking algorithm determines that this a higher priority link and ranks the page, that this is linked to, higher.
As a site owner, you want to seek links from good pages that are related to the terms you want to be found for. Linking strategy is not a trick as many get rich quick advisors would have you believe. Links for the sake of links have no value whatsoever. Indeed, they can damage your rankings. So forget about link farms and other similar ineffective options. A small number of inbound links from great, relevant sites will be much more valuable than many links from low-traffic, irrelevant sites.
However, you should not become obsessed by link popularity alone. Decide how much time and effort you are prepared to invest in relation to your other activities and be disciplined about your approach. Monitor your results and adapt your strategy as necessary.
Reciprocal linking refers to an arrangement with another site such that both of you provide links to each other from their respective sites. These are generally ‘free’ links, but they could also be ‘affiliate’ links that entail a payment when a visitor is referred from one site to another.
Like reciprocal linking, inward links to your website can be an effective strategy to increase your website’s visibility. Inward links are links pointing to your websites from other websites without providing a reciprocal link from your website.
There are many techniques to improve inward linking. Many of these have enjoyed success. The most proven technique for inward linking is through Ebooks. You can offer interesting and educative Ebooks for free to other websites and they could install the icons or the Ebooks on their sites. The icon or the Ebook you create would have a link to your website. This will allow a spider to crawl through that link and visit you website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have a link to your website that would increase the probability of your website being listed with a crawler based Search Engine.
Other techniques include posting newsletters, white papers, news stories and press releases at other websites, particularly industry specific and general portals. The newsletters and press releases would contain a link pointing to your website, thus, promoting your website.
In addition to the free and paid search engine listings, several search engines allow you to actively bid for positions under search terms. When someone searches for a specific term, the listings show up in the order of highest bidder first, second highest bidder second and so on. If two companies bid the same amount, the first bid gets priority for the listing and will be listed first. Such programs are called Paid Placement Programs or Pay-per-click programs. You only pay when someone clicks on your listing and is delivered to your website.
Benefits of Paid-Placement / Pay-per-click Campaigns• Search Engine Marketing campaigns are effective for increasing web site traffic quickly.
• Pay-per-click programs will allow you to quickly test the ability for your web site to convert visitors to a call to action or make a purchase.
• You will be able to identify which keyword phrases will provide the best conversion rate.
• While ordinary search results frequently include links to non-working pages, home pages with irrelevant content and filler listings, paid search content ensures a user will gain quick access to relevant sites of interest. Since each listing is displayed by either a keyword search or relevant text link, you are ensured only visitors with interest are being sent to your site. Thus, pay-per-click programs offer a more targeted approach.
The most prominent and successful Paid Placement programs are Google Adwords and Overture.In 1998, Overture was the first to charge advertisers to be listed in its search results. Now, all the major search companies have jumped in. So-called paidsearch revenue grew 40% last year, to $1.4 billion. It's now up to 23% of the $6 billion Net advertising market, which shrank 17% last year, according to analysts' projections.
Placing ads near search results offers the simple appeal of the Yellow Pages, but with different economics. Overture made $78 million last year on $668 million in sales, about half of the paid-search market. That's more than Yahoo made on $953 million of revenue, largely from traditional online ads such as banners. Paid search also pushed search specialists LookSmart and Ask Jeeves Inc. into profitability in the fourth quarter. And the biggest potential initial public offering of an Internet company this year is Google Inc., which began offering pay-per-click search last year. Search ads will make up the lion's share of Google's revenue, estimated at $350 million to $400 million.
Google offers a paid placement program called Google Adwords. Paid listings in Google appear above and to the side of its regular results. Like most Paid Placement or Pay-per-click programs you are charged a fee only when a visitor clicks on your listing. There is a $5 activation fee for this service and there is no monthly minimum fee.
Some advantages of Google Adwords are:• Your price is automatically lowered to one cent more than your closest competitor.
• No one can lock in the top position because user click through rates and CPC (cost per click) determine where your ad is shown. The most relevant ads rise to the top.
• Google offers a unique set of tools to forecast your budget and select target keywords.• You can target your ads to users in a specific country or only to speakers of a specific language.
When you advertise in Overture Premium Listings™, your business appears in the top U.S. search sites: MSN, Yahoo!, InfoSpace, Lycos, AltaVista, and Netscape.
Overture offers two sign-up plans, Fast Track or Self Serve. You have to select a few keywords with reference to your website. You have to then bid an amount (per click) and position in the search results for each of the keyword. If you have the highest bid for that position, Overture will display your website in the search result of the keyword selected, at the position selected, in each of the above mentioned search engines. Note that even if your website is displayed in the search results you do not get charged the amount bid by you per click. It is only when a user clicks on your website link from the search results that you get charged that amount.
The higher the position, the higher is the current bid amount. Also, in order to keep your account active, you have to spend at least $20 a month. Your account with Overture will be discontinued if the total clicks on your website amount to less than $20.
The two sign-up plans, Fast Track or Self Serve, give you the choice of expert assistance or starting out on your own. Fast Track charges an additional onetime service fee of $199 whereas Self Serve does not have any service fee.
When you sign up with Overture using the Fast Track Sign-up program, you will receive a customized proposal prepared by one of the Overture experts. When you receive your proposal, all you have to do is approve Overture's choices to get your search listings online. You can also make changes in the proposal yourself.
Two basic concepts apply to using these types of search engines (Overture and Google Adwords) to your best advantage:
• While you obviously want to pay the least possible amount for each hit you get, you’re going to have to bid more if you want a higher listing and, therefore, more traffic. You have to carefully track the traffic you get from the search engine so you know the value of that traffic. If you don’t know the value, you could be paying too much for your traffic or missing great opportunities to generate more traffic if you can afford the higher price.
In other words, let’s assume you’re selling an item with a $25 profit margin. If one (1%) percent of visitors to your site buy the product, then each visitor is worth twenty five ($0.25) cents to you. If you get the traffic for less than that, you’re making money on each sale.
• The other concept involves bidding for several hundred keywords at low prices such as one penny each. This way you get listed all over the search engine. Each keyword won’t bring you much traffic by itself, but the total may be a hundred or more hits per day. If you’re only paying a couple of pennies per hit for this traffic, then it should be profitable for you.
If you search popular terms like "business", you’ll find the cost to be number one is quite high and the position is usually held by a large enterprise like Inc. magazine or Entrepreneur magazine. Large companies are often willing to invest millions of dollars in building their brands so they’ll pay more for traffic than it would normally be worth. I strongly suggest you don’t compete with them unless you are absolutely sure your business model will justify it.
Often, you’ll be able to find a top ten ranking for a third or less than the price to be number “One”. Since you’re limited to buying only traffic that’s profitable for you, this position will be better suited for you. Even if you end up far lower in the rankings, you must stay within your proper range for investment. You’ll probably get less traffic than the number one ranking, but you’ll get traffic you can make money on. That’s far more important.
In affiliate schemes, you provide incentives (usually a commission on the sale of your product or service) for your customers or visitors to become affiliates (i.e. carriers). These affiliates then generate you traffic, which in turn provides you with more affiliates, and so on.
Affiliate Programs create powerful alliances between an online merchant's web site and various "affiliate" web sites. Providing affiliate links to your website would also improve your website’s search engine ranking. It makes your website more visible to search engines.
Tips for making your Affiliate Program attractiveHere are some tips to help you in attracting other sites for your affiliate programs on your website. Doing some research would help you immensely in increasing traffic to your website and making the affiliate programs as viral as possible.
The most important aspect of any affiliate program is the incentive. You should offer better incentives than your competitor sites. Money is the biggest and best form of incentive you could offer your customers. Offering a percentage of your sales revenue resulting out of each successful hit can be a great incentive.
Apart from the normal incentives, offer something unique such as cash awards and bonuses for three affiliate members who are responsible for bringing in the highest traffic or highest business to your website. This would provide greater motivation for prospective ‘affiliates’ to not only join your affiliate program but also refer your website to more people.
Most standard affiliate schemes reward only the subscriber directly responsible for bringing more traffic. Develop a second and third tier incentive program for your affiliates. In other words, reward both the affiliate responsible for bringing visitors to your website as well as the other person who had originally referred this affiliate. Let me illustrate this strategy. Let us say John referred Max to your website and your affiliate program. Max liked your affiliate program and joined it and eventually bought your product or service offered on your website. In this case, John would get a percentage of the profit. Now let’s say, Max referred your website to a friend of his – Harry. Harry visits your website – likes your product – and buys it. A single tier incentive program would reward Max by giving him a percentage of the profit generated. A two tier incentive program would offer Max a percentage of the profit as well as John a percentage of the profit because John referred Max in the first place. This strategy is expansive but very fruitful.
The above point can be explained in simple terms as “Make it as easy and as natural for affiliates to promote your product or service as possible, by letting your affiliates benefit from those whom they refer”. This will encourage your affiliates to convince more people to visit your website and even join your affiliate program.
Keep updating the content of your affiliate program. For example, if your affiliate program is subscription to a paid or even free newsletter, make sure that you update the topics and content of the newsletter constantly. The content should always be informative and unique.
Press release distribution is an extremely cost-effective Internet marketing tool. It can build more credibility than any other Internet marketing technique because most readers are more likely to trust independent authorities such as reviewers, columnists, reporters or broadcasters than an over hyped advertising message. A well-written press release can dramatically project your company to the masses, and greatly enhance the image of your business.
Many companies provide a subscription based or opt-in e-mail press release model. Once you have an attractive press release written for your website, you can submit this press release to a company that has an opt-in email list. This company would then send the press release to a large number of subscribers who would be interested in your product or services.
The cost for submitting the press release to a number of people can be anywhere from $200 to $350 per press release. This cost does not include writing and editing the press release. Also, some companies do give discounted price if press releases are submitted regularly.
Press-Release campaigns have many benefits. They would create awareness about your website in your target audience and immensely increase incoming traffic to your website. Additionally, they provide inward links to your site, if they carry your URL – thus improving your search engine ranking.
Treating a customer base as a collection of e-mail addresses to hurl offers at, until one sticks, is shortsighted. Companies that are content to invest in poorly targeted e-mail campaigns, that blast out calls to action, risk alienating their customers and eroding brand equity. This one-off approach, which remains fairly common, systematically lowers the bar for what the market considers spam. EMail marketing (EM) is not simply the electronic equivalent of direct mail; it is a customer feedback mechanism that smart companies leverage to build and maintain positive long-term relationships with clients.
Instead of segmenting lists carefully and targeting offers and relevant content to specific audiences, too many marketers routinely blast their client e-mail lists with near reckless abandon. Industry studies routinely show that well-planned, permission-based EM returns immediate results, substantially higher conversion rates, and lower overall costs than direct mail.
Well-designed EM programs create multiplier effects that extend upfront investments in acquisition tools and generate higher average revenues per customer.
Aberdeen’s research report, EM: Relevancy Retention & ROI, found that organizations attempting to optimize EM as a piece of their marketing mix require a lot of “handholding.” As EM adoption increases, seasoned marketers want to create and deliver more easily consumable value for their customers. Though a place exists for one-off campaigns, companies should lead with well-planned communication programs that in turn create demand for marketing outreach.
A DoubleClick/MSI Study revealed that, in 2002, marketers will shift a significant portion of their ad spending to direct-response television and e-mail marketing (18% and 17% increases, respectively).
E-mail marketing has become tougher and tougher due to the fact that there is so much junk e-mail out there today. You must immediately strike a chord with the reader. How many e-mails do you receive that you delete, without reading them, because you think they are junk? Next time you get a chance, study those emails and try to avoid what they're doing.
The best way to approach e-mail advertising is to do it through targeted e-mail marketing. Start a newsletter for your site, if you have not already, because it will prove to be an invaluable marketing tool. It's a way to keep in touch with your visitors, and introduce them to new products and content. If your newsletter gets popular enough you can start charging people to put ads in your newsletter. The most important part of your newsletter is that you can build a loyal customer following.
This is a newly emerging but extremely targeted and effective form of promoting your online business.