Getting noticed on the web is the holy grail of most webmasters and rightfully so. Not only can you turn visitors into dollars, if done properly, but it also gives a feeling of accomplishment. In all honesty getting people to your sight is really not that difficult. There is probably 1000 things that you can do to attract visitors. The real trick is making use of all of them. The mistake that a lot of people make is believing that there is one magical way, some mystical ritual that will invoke the visitor magnet spell. Ok, so Im being facetious but the reality is it does take work and diligence to make things happen. This is by no means a complete list, for a beginning webmaster or someone who is interested in becoming a webmaster, to follow. I am going to assume that an idea for a web site hasalready been decided upon.
1. The web site itself. This is a very important aspect of web marketing but I am focusing primarily on external web marketing. There are, however a few things that I want to cover here because I believe they are very important.
CONVENIENCE This is a big one. People today are accustomed to getting things fast from drive thru pharmacies to high speed internet. Instant gratification has become the rule of the day. With this in mind, web pages should load quickly. Believe it or not a 4 second load time for a page is extremely slow today. When the page is loaded potential customers expect to find what they are looking for immediately. Your site should be very welllaid out and everything should be easily and quickly navigated. The brick and mortar days of putting the most popular items in the back so customers have to walk through the whole store are not effective for online businesses. This strategy should be avoided at all costs. Some studies have shown that if customers do not find what they are looking for in the first 15 seconds they will move on.
2. The first steps in getting the word out. Visit the popular business directories. http://dir.yahoo.com/, http://sbd.bcentral.com/,http://yellowpages.aol.com/#,. There are hundreds more.
3. Search engine submittal. A lot of web sites offer this service for a fee. I personally have never found it worth it. I recommend doing this yourself. It is easy and does not take that long to do if you submit it to the top search engines.
4. Forums. Get to know your market. There really is no better research than visiting forums related to your market and reading. Find out what your customers concerns are. Keep reading until you feel comfortable enough to post. Dont spam the forums and be sure to read the rules for posting. A lotof forums will allow you to leave a link and some will not. Either way make sure you respect the guidelines for posting. I did come across a trick for getting recognized by search engines. Most forums allow you an avatar. That is a picture that appears when you post. You can usually set that up in yourpreferences when you sign up at most any forums. Typically it is a link to offsite where the picture is hosted. Make sure it is hosted from your web site and named after it. I made a bunch of avatars for a lot of friends and hosted them from my web site. To my surprise, it definitely caught the attention of the search engines. You goal here is to help not only advertise. After long enough you might just be the person everyone hasquestions for.
By starting with these four marketing strategies you can lay the foundation for a strong presence on the web. It will not happen over night but it will increase the popularity of your web site. Remember, web marketing is a cumulative proposition. The more marketing strategies you use the better.
About the author: Casey Tyler is an internet marketer and owner of . A web hosting company dedicated to helping new webmaster achieve success.
Nurture Your Customer Relationships
Simply put, customer relationship management is a way of tracking and nurturing your customer relationships throughout the customers life-cycle, as they move from prospect to customer, to repeat-buyer. Once a customer buys from you, it is much more profitable to make efforts to keep that customer, than it is to acquire a new one, because there is now trust between you. If your customer is happy with your product, then that customer is much more likely to buy from you again in the future, much more likely than a new prospect would be. Thats why customer relationship management is so crucial.
Dont badger your customers to death with every product and affiliate offer you come across, especially if the products are unrelated to the product the customer originally purchased. Email your customers ONLY when you have something good to give them, some really helpful information, or when you have a really good, high-quality offer that would interest that particular customer. For instance, dont email your Internet Marketing customer a Free Gift Certificate to your gift store.
Automate Your Customer Relationship Management
Well, how do you automate customer relationship management in your e-business You use email, and a dynamic database. You use auto-responders to stay in touch. Im not talking about your regular auto-responders that deliver a vacation or out of office messages while youre away, either. Im talking about sequential auto-responders.
Use Sequential Auto-Responders In Your e-Business
Sequential auto-responders allow you to pre-format and load a series of pre-typed messages to your prospects and customers. You benefit by not having to follow-up with these customers manually each time. Instead, your auto-responder delivers your messages on a timed interval set by you. To your customer, it looks as if you sent out each message yourself. This way, you stay in touch with your customer and not let them forget about you. When they have a need for one your products or services, your business will hopefully come to mind first and they will re-visit your site directly or by clicking a link in one of your emails, as a loyal repeat customer.
Personalize Your Messages for a Warm Feel! (Mail Merge)
Most decent auto-responders have mail-merge capabilities. This is the ability to merge personal information into your emails, like your customers first and/or last name or their email address, etc. This personalizes your email messages even further and gives your customer some warm and fuzzies. Whats more you set all this up just one time, and any new prospects or customers will get the same message series without you having to lift a finger.
If the sequential auto-responder youre using has mail-merge capabilities, then it will automatically take that customers name and incorporate it into the email series you have set up. Usually the auto-responder service youre using will have some sort of tokens set up for this purpose. Look at the example below. Lets say your customer or prospects name is Bob.
Hello, $firstname, - That translates into: Hello, Bob.
You could also do this with a customers email address too, like $email. The token would be replaced with the customers email: bob@bob.tldDo you see the power of mail-merge
Use Lead Capture and Subscription Boxes
For instance, you could set up a simple box on your sales or download page that asks the customer for his/her name and email address in return for some free product, or simply just to subscribe to your newsletter. If you set up a page specifically for this purpose this is called a lead capture page. The information entered by the customer into your subscription box can be mail merged into the follow-up messages sent by your auto-responder.
Stay In Touch
Keep in contact with your prospects and customers. Set your auto-responder series to deliver your messages over an extended interval. There are several e-books and articles dedicated to this topic; however, if you want the first, most informative and still the king of auto-responder help, get AutoResponder Magic. This e-book once sold for about $17, but you should be able to find it free many places on the Net. It has a plethora of information regarding auto-responders, as well as many examples you can build from.
Ettione Stuckey has a passion for ecommerce and Internet Marketing. He is an accomplished webmaster, who runs several ecommerce websites. He understands the science and application of ecommerce technology and concepts. Benefit from his efforts at