Beginning Steps To Marketing Success

Simple easy to use marketing strategies for the beginning webmaster

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Getting noticed on the web

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 I’m 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 has already been decided upon.

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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 well laid 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.

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. Don’t spam the forums and be sure to read the rules for posting. A lot of 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 your preferences 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 has questions 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.

Professional Traffic Building Tips

Let’s face it; the Internet is cluttered with all sorts of guides about increasing traffic to your web site. Unfortunately, most of these guides are outdated or incomplete. In fact, many of the techniques being touted in them will get you in serious trouble. Wouldn’t you like to build up quality traffic that will stand the test of time? The key phrase is “test of time”. You don’t want to be a flash in the pan.

Cyber key.com

Let’s face it; the Internet is cluttered with all sorts of guides about increasing traffic to your web site. Unfortunately, most of these guides are outdated or incomplete. In fact, many of the techniques being touted in them will get you in serious trouble. Wouldn’t you like to build up quality traffic that will stand the test of time? The key phrase is “test of time”. You don’t want to be a flash in the pan.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

Before you rush out to tell the world that your brand new web site is open for business, set it up properly. Do not even start to think about traffic if your web site still has broken links, empty content, and other unfinished business. While patience can be a hard thing to control, having some will pay off later. Once your web site is completely operational from top to bottom, you are ready to flood it with traffic.

SEARCH ENGINES

While there are many web sites out there which claim to be search engines, you only need to be concerned with a few of the major ones like Google, MSN, etc. You do not need to submit your web site to these engines—they will find you on their own once your web site is being linked from other web sites.

Never pay for a service or software that does this function because it will be a complete waste of money. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either trying to sell you a product or lacks real experience on the matter. The goal is to get your web site linked on other related web sites, which will cause the search engines to index your web site and visit somewhat often to look for changes.

DIRECTORIES

Your first step to building a solid traffic foundation is to submit your site to good directories. Doing so will increase your incoming links, page rank and traffic. Many directories charge a fee for a listing—most are one-time fees. Following is a breakdown of some of the more important directories to get listed in.

The ODP (Dmoz.org)
Submission to this directory is free and it is one of the best to be listed in. It is extremely important that you read their guidelines. All submissions are reviewed by an editor and the approval process can take weeks to months. Many web site owners have waited a long time before having their web site added. It is worth the wait.

Yahoo.com
Adding your web site to this very popular directory will cost $299 annually.

Because of the price, you will want to think about this one. Experiences with Yahoo listings are on both sides of the aisle. The best thing to do is see where your web site will most likely be listed and evaluate the conditions for that section.

sbd.Bcentral.com
This is Microsoft’s business directory and it will be a solid listing for you. The current listing fee is $50, which includes the use of their web site tuning service. This service will evaluate your pages and let you know if the page is ready to submit or contains errors such as under-optimization and spam alerts. It can help you optimize your pages for the keyword phrases you are interested in.

SevenSeek.com
This directory has a great page rank and many back links. As will all directory submissions, pay attention to the guidelines. The fee for submission is $40. Seven Seek is a general directory so just about any web site will fit here.

GoGuides.org
Go Guides is another great directory to get your web site into.

Their web site is crawled by all the bots daily, which is a great plus. Submission is $40 for this general directory.

Wowdirectory.com
Wow Directory is a large general themed directory. Web site submissions are free but approval can take some time. They offer an express submit for $20 that will ensure your web site is listed within 24 hours.

There are many more directories out there but these are some solid ones to get into first. In time, your web site will begin to appear in the major search engines. Most directories that charge for submission have adopted the policy started by Yahoo where the fee is for “review” only. It is absolutely vital that you read over all the guidelines to be certain that your web site will be accepted.

ARTICLES

A great way to generate traffic and back links to your web site is by writing articles. Here is the general process of how it works:

1. You craft a great article.


2. You submit that article to web sites geared towards web site owners needing content.

3. Owners grab your article, which contains a link to your web site, and use it on their web site.

As you can see, the process is very simple. When other web site owners place your article on their web site, you will be generating incoming links all over the Internet with no work at all. This will not only lead to possible traffic but help to establish the value of your web site to the search engines so better rankings.

It is very important that your article is written well. If not, quality web site owners are much less likely to use your article and it makes you look bad. Most web site owners skip this important step in traffic building because they can not craft effective articles. If this is you, do something about it visit Jason A. Martin right now and click on the “Articles for your web site” link. For a small fee, articles can be generated for you and you retain full rights.

Once received, simply slap your name on it and submit to places like ContentTycoon.com, Ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, etc.

This is perhaps one of the most important steps of all and after your article is written, it takes no work. The results can be extremely fast. Many articles out there are not crafted well so it is important to not formulate your writing style and perception blindly on the work of others. While many web sites that offer articles claim to “edit” them, it is more of a casual edit.

TEXT LINKS

The goal here is to increase the number of links from related web sites. For example, if your web site is about hot dogs, you will want to obtain links from web sites that are about such topics as: hot dogs, eating, hot dog buns, hot dog toppings, hot dog contests, etc. Obtaining a link from Joe’s Engine Parts will not help much and may actually hurt in regards to search engine rankings.

After thinking up words and phrases that are related to your main topic, visit your favorite search engine and search for those items. Visit the web sites that come up and try to get your link on them. Some might exchange a link with you, some might offer a link on their web site in exchange for payment, and some might simply say no. Keep at it.

IN THE END

By completing these tasks, your web site will have established a solid foundation that will withstand changes the future holds. I invite you to read about ways to promote your web site, improve ad copy, and much more by visiting InternetBusinessEntrepreneur.com. Remember to always keep a sense of pride about your web site. Resist the temptations to do actions which will hurt your web site and build it with the future in mind.