Successful Internet Marketing

How strong are your Web site strategies? Do they move your business toward achieving your objectives or overall goals? Think of your strategies as a framework that clarifies the approaches you will take in meeting your Web site's objectives. They are more specific than the objective, but do not include exact details. After developing the strategic framework, you will fill in the details with tactics (I will leave tactics discussions for later, in part four of this series.).

You can increase your strategies' effectiveness by taking into consideration the business environment you operate in - both online and offline. Two approaches to analyzing the business environment are to complete 1) an industry analysis such as Porter's Five Forces and 2) a situation analysis such as a SWOT analysis.

Porter's Five Forces

A formal industry analysis, such as Michael Porter's Five Forces, is more in depth than simply looking for trends and general industry information and can help you better develop successful strategies.

Michael Porter's Five Forces can provide insight into both your online and offline competitive environments. In the Five Forces Model, Porter explains that in any industry there are five forces that influence what happens within the industry:

Existing companies

1. Potential new companies
2. Substitutes for products offered
3. The suppliers
4. The customers.

These five forces combine to make up the business environment. By studying the structure of and dynamics between these forces, you can discover opportunities for improving upon your strategies. Porter designed his basic model to be applied to an entire industry. The same analytical method, however, could also be used to study a narrower universe, such as online presence within an industry. When developing your Web site marketing plan, for example, you can identify the "forces" as:

Using these definitions for the five forces, you can get a clearer picture of the business environment in which your Web site competes. Be aware, however, this is not a true Five Forces analysis. This analysis only borrows Porter's forces to lend structure. His full analysis goes beyond the information gathering and cursory analysis explained here. By fully utilizing Porter's strategic methods you can gain an even clearer picture of the industry, resulting in sounder strategies. To fully appreciate Porter's model, study his two classics, "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries" and "Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance".

SWOT Analysis

In a SWOT analysis, you identify strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities for your company, and threats to your business. You then use the analysis to develop strategies that will minimize the affect of your weaknesses on your business while maximizing your strengths. Ideally, you will match your strengths against market opportunities that result from your competitors' weaknesses or voids.

When completing a SWOT analysis, you may find it helpful to create a table identifying observations relative to each SWOT component for both your company's site and your competitors' sites. In the table, note Internet-related activities such as trade organization participation, search engine inclusion, and outside links to the sites. Then, from the table you create you can spot your company's strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats to your business.

Often, opportunities arise as a result of a changing business environment. As you study your competitors, be on the lookout for these opportunities. Some situations that could represent opportunities for a company include, but are certainly not limited to:

Once you develop your strategies, you will be ready to choose tactics for your Web site marketing plan.

1. Web Site Design

A properly designed web page will lead you halfway to successful Internet marketing. There are many free web design software programs available online-FrontPage Express, PageBreeze, and CoffeeCup, just to mention a few. These freeware programs offer basic functions that are good for beginners. You can upgrade to an advanced version when you gain more experience. I will leave the technical aspect of putting up a web page to the software expert.

Successful Internet marketing is attributed to a few important points about web page design, which are discussed below. A successful web page usually uses a plain white background. This is a common secret among successful Internet marketers. Look at Google and Yahoo. Their web pages are always plain and simple, with white background. This proven style is a shortcut to successful Internet marketing.

The look and content of your web site has to suit your target customers. To win the loyalty and trust of your visitors, you need to identify with them. A trading site has to look professional, whereas a hobby site targeting young people can be casual and fun, and a dating site should look romantic and loving. When the visitors feel comfortable with your site, they will revisit frequently. Keep navigation of the web site simple.

Avoid putting irrelevant information or products on the same site; this will confuse and frustrate your visitors. You have less than 10 seconds to draw the interest of your visitors before they decide to leave the site, therefore you need to make full use of this precious golden 10 seconds to sell your product. Offer focus and in-depth information surrounding the main theme of the site. Keep the title and first few lines relevant, and drive home the message you want to deliver.

A well-written sales letter will urge the customers to read on and convince them to opt in to your list or purchase your products. If your site is comprised of a few pages, add a catalog function to your page to make searching information systematic, direct, easy, and efficient. Catalog buttons allow visitors to find the information they want without going through the entire web site and make it more user-friendly. Always maintain consistency of style throughout all the pages to give a holistic feel. The speed of loading your web site and downloading information are important. Online customers who are used to speed lack the patience to wait for your web site to load or download.

They will leave the site if it does not appear within the tolerable waiting time, usually about 10 seconds. Always beta test your site before launching to identify and rectify problems. Choose software and formats that offer faster download speed. Finally, projecting a credible image is the most important aspect of successful Internet marketing. Include a privacy statement at the opt-in box to offer comfort for readers to give you their email addresses and names.

Use PayPal and ClickBank as payment modes to boost the credibility of your site and instill confidence in the customer during the purchase process. A web site that adopts the above simple suggestions will lead to successful Internet marketing in a short time.

2. Search Engine Optimization

How to increase search engine ranking is a major subject as far as successful Internet marketing is concerned. In this article, we look at search engine optimization (SEO). There are many methods for SEO. Here, we focus on article writing and links. Writing a keyword-rich article for the spiders to crawl your web site is what you need to do to help improve your ranking. If you are not a good writer, you can hire a ghostwriter. Ghostwriters are people who write articles and sell them for a fee.

They are trained to write articles with rich keyword distribution, which helps the article rank well. The advantage of using ghostwriters is that they sell you the ownership of their articles. That way, you can edit them the way you want to suit your products. Unlike free content for download, where the content is copied multiple times, private-label articles offer fresh content that makes your web site interesting all the time.

Spiders pay better attention to web sites that are updated regularly with new content. Putting links to complementary products in your web pages helps you rank better by the search engines. You can offer web masters the right to reproduce your articles on their web sites for free; in reciprocation, you ask them to put your link on their sites. Alternatively, you include a resource box with your url to direct the traffic from their site to yours for free. Exchanging links with web sites that offer products complementary to yours is a good way to get people to give you their links.

Creating two-way traffic is important to get good results. These links send free traffic to your web site. Affiliate links are powerful links that not only increase your ranking tremendously but also generate extra commission revenue if they lead to a sale. There are many popular sites that offer affiliate links-Amazon, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and many others. Linking to these popular sites leverages your position in successful Internet marketing. Linking to a high-ranking site makes the search engines pay more attention to your site.

The more links you have, the higher the ranking and the higher chance of success for Internet marketing you'll have. SEO is only one of the ways to successful Internet marketing. There many other strategies available to drive traffic to your web site, but SEO is one of the proven strategies that gives quick results. Successful Internet marketers use articles and links frequently in their business models.

3. Blogs

Blogs have gained popularity and importance in the Internet space over the past few years. Becoming a blog user is free; people without computer knowledge can set up a blog instantly and start posting messages immediately. There is no restriction on a time and place for blogging, and there are many ready-made templates to customize the blog. Most important of all, people love the informal nature of blogs, which allows posting of any kind-from expressing opinions to keeping a diary, sharing photos or traditional herbal cures, creating awareness of a social issue, or anything people can think of.

Blogging is unique in its way. It is for all age groups, and it has become part of our daily life. Politicians see the power of blogs, and they too use blogs to stay in touch with supporters. The community of blog users is vast and is growing constantly. As such, it is a big market to explore. Successful Internet marketers saw the opportunity of using blogs for Internet marketing. Creating several blogs to cross-link with web sites results in viral effects. You can imagine how much traffic the blogs can generate effectively.

People who visit a blog are those with a specific interest on a subject. Therefore blogs generate lots of free, targeted traffic to the site. The use of blogs in Internet marketing will inevitably become the next trend. Trust building among blog users is strong. When people find a blog reliable and interesting, they will visit the blog frequently for new posts. This makes it an ideal place to post your article for Internet marketing purposes. Nevertheless, it is important that you are truthful and sincere in your posting. Hard selling products on the blog will cost you the trust you gained.

Tactful use of articles in blogs is an art to successful Internet marketing. Ensure that posts are relevant to a chosen theme. Avoid posting irrelevant information on the blog, since this will downgrade the trustworthiness of your blog. It is wise to use different blogs for different products in the marketing exercise.

After all, it is free. There are many ways of using articles on blogs. Offering a link to an article, based on your recommendation, is preferred. This method does not risk losing trust, should your article fail to win the hearts of your visitors and be read as a sales tactic. After creating a successful network of blogs, it is best to prevent the loss of a popular blog due to changes by the service provider. They may drop the blog at any time. Losing a successful blog costs you money and time and is painful, so do not let it happen. Always have it hosted on your own server to have full control of your online asset. Successful Internet marketing using blogs is straightforward and brings many returns. This is a highly recommended Internet marketing method; it will be the way to successful Internet marketing in the times to come.