So you have a website, email address, and youre getting your newsletter out there (well, at least a little bit). Youve been to seminars, bought information about how to promote your site, and youre ready to implement.
You decide to start creating keywords for search engines. Then, someone tells you to do pay per click, ezine advertising, write articles, participate in discussion forums, start a blog, update your newsletter, write a sales letter, write a better headline, automate your mailing list, do joint venturesAck! This marketing stuff is hard!
It doesnt have to be that way. Before you dive into the specifics of any marketing campaign, you must know first exactly what you want to accomplish with your efforts. There are 3 major results you will receive with your marketing:
1. Visibility Visibility is getting your company or product name out there to your marketing. One of the best ways to get visibility is simply to advertise. You can advertise in online or offline publications that are read by your target market the people who will want to buy your companys product.
2. Credibility To get credibility, one must get an endorsement by another person or company. This result is most useful for independent service professionals who need to be known as an expert to get clients. Credibility can be easily produced through writing articles, speaking or press releases.
3. One-To-One Connection Once you have prospects or customers, you will want to keep them up to date and informed of your products or services. This can be done in the form of a simple thank note, or in a more broad sense through the use of technology such as newsletters. One-on-one connection builds and maintains relationships with your prospects so when they are ready to buy, they come to you.
Once you know the end result you want to achieve, you can then begin to drill down into the specific strategies and tactics that you can use to achieve that end result. For example, if you need credibility and decide to write articles, then study the specific article format that successful article writers use to generate traffic to their website. Get really good at ONE THING and watch your profits soar!
Stephanie Frank is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker and entrepreneur. Take the free quiz Do You Have What It Takes To Be The Next Accidental Millionaire and receive over $1,574 of business building tools and resources at
Many new comers to the Internet business believe that the degree to their success is related to the level of traffic they can bring to their sites.
There is truth in this sentiment, but it must be molded by the actual experience of doing business online.
Bringing visitors to a web site is necessary to producing sales.
After all, it is these visitors who will be transacting business with the site.
Every business owner would agree that the higher the number of potential customers who interact with his business, the higher the number of sales will be.
But it is in this statement that an important Internet truth is touched on.
The number of visitors to a site is only beneficial according to the need of these visitors for the sites offerings.
Interested visitors will respond to a sites offering, while visitors who have no affinity for the sites offering will simply move on.
Website owners need to ensure that the traffic that they are receiving is comprised of individuals who have an interest in the market segment being covered.
Targeted advertising comes into play here.
For a site to be successful it must attract targeted traffic. The visitors that see the site must have an expressed interest in the products and services being offered.
Most spam emails are simply deleted because the recipient has no affinity to the product or service being offered.
On the other hand, medical ads that appear in online medical trade journals have a very high response rate because visitors have a clear interest in the medical field.
Effective online advertising is based on matching the ad, or site, to people who are already interested in the products and services being offered.
From a mathematical point of view, it is easier to produce sales from targeted traffic than from generic visitors.
Lets assume that 1 out of 100 overweight people will buy a diet book today. If they see your ad, you have a chance of capturing 1 sale per every 100 visitors you receive from this market segment.
Now lets say that in a random group of 100 people 30 will be overweight.
So you need 330 generic visitors to attract 100 overweight visitors.
This means that you need over three times as much generic traffic to gain a sale than from targeted traffic.
It is for this reason that successful online businesses use targeted traffic in their campaigns.
The only exception to this rule is when you can bring in an overwhelming amount of traffic without breaking your budget.
An exception using the above example would be when you can bring in those 330 random visitors for less than the cost of bringing in those 100 targeted visitors.
You would actually need more than 330 random visitors to make room for the odds of there being less than 30% overweight visitors arriving to your site.
Donny Lowy has set up to show entrepreneurs how to advertise for free.