How To Market Your Internet Business

When it comes to working from home or working from the office, you need to know how to market your internet business. In fact, over 80% of the work – of making your business a long term successful outfit, is actually doing the research prior to building your website. Amazing isn’t it? Yet, most people never do this or never even log-in to a keyword research tool. So let’s get started with some helpful pointers.

An internet business is like any other kind of business, except that it is digital by nature. This means that your advertising mediums must be via the web for the best results (traditional advertising mediums such as newspapers can also be effective). They could be in the format of video, text, audio, or a combination of all three. With the sudden rise and popularity of video on the web, my vote goes towards video as the one item you should be using on your sales page. Even if it is just a welcome message with someone saying “hello”, it needs to be there. People feel an interaction and a connection with someone when they get to see them, hear them, and listen to them.

So, now that you know you must use video to market your web business properly in 2009, how do you get visitors to actually see the sales page you have? This question requires some thought and it would be best if you sit down for a while and begin to think of the target market that your business “talks” to. What kind of people are most likely to purchase your products or services? Are they teenagers, middle-aged, or elderly people? What is the average income (estimate) of someone who buys your products?

All of these kinds of questions are vital when you are forming your business blueprint. From the answers you write down, you can then formulate a plan that meets the needs of your target market in terms of:

• website design
• advertising strategy
• “lingo” of the market
• proper price to charge
• emotional “triggers” to use
• and more…

Website Design

Website design is an obvious one. If you view any childrens’ websites, you will see that they are colorful and full of fun shapes. They include talking characters, animations, and everything that attracts a young person’s eye. Now go ahead and do a search for luxury yachts. Are you going to see an animated duck talking about the specifications of the twin-engine diesel yacht? No, absolutely not. This is what I mean by the website design cooperating with the target market.

Advertising Strategies

The next point is advertising strategy. This is where you decide how you are going to get those visitors to your website. With all due respect to the other types of advertising, there are only two or three main ways of driving traffic on the web. They include:

• Pay Per Click
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media

You can pay for each individual visitor that comes to your site, by placing relevant ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You set the price you want to pay per click and then measure your adspend vs sales. This type of advertising is quite effective, fast, and a great way to “test the waters” of any potential market, IF you have the money to spend. I say “IF”, because many people burn a hole in their wallet before they even have a chance to log into their pay per click account the next day. So tread carefully if you are new to PPC.

Second on the plate is search engine optimization or “SEO”. Now I don’t care who you are, what your budget is, or what your level of skill is in regards to marketing online. You SHOULD be using search engine strategies for your website promotion. This method is a long and patient one, but well worth it. Essentially, you are trading your time for money by utilizing the process of structuring your website, so that in a few months it can appear in the results of searches on the web. The payoff is loads of free, targeted traffic.

Last but not least we have video. Now at the present time, there is very limited knowledge in the way of ranking your videos on the search engines, so millions of people can see them, BUT you can still create useful videos and post them to sites such as YouTube and MetaCafe. These sites are viewed by millions of people a day and in turn, offer a great way for you to get the word out there about your business.

Market Lingo

The lingo of the market is also very important. What is this lingo you speak of Marcus? Well what I mean by this, is the common language used by the people that are involved in your market. For example, let’s look at  the saltwater fish hobby. I am involved with this hobby so I can assure you there is an “in-market lingo” used that is not used elsewhere. You will have terms being used such as calcium reactor, sump, siphon hole, live rock, aragonite, phosphorous, and other things that may confuse the average person. However, to an avid hobbyist, these words make perfect sense. So it’s all about getting the right “words” out there and making yourself an authority within the market.

Proper Price

Although somewhat obvious, this may be an overlooked item on the checklist for success. I can’t tell you how many people have a product or service they are promoting, and create a price for it out of thin air. At the very least, you should be doing SOME competition browsing and taking notes of what other people are charging for a similar service. If all of the used car dealers in your area were selling 1996 used vans for $6,000 dollars, would you go out then and sell your 1996 van for $15,000 dollars?

Emotional Triggers

This is a very important step when selling or pre-selling your product. Depending on whether or not you are an affiliate or a merchant, this may vary a bit but the principles are the same. Visitors that come to your site are not statistics, they are human beings with needs and wants. They have problems and they want a solution to their problem. As long as you offer a moral viable solution to their issue, you can effectively use known emotional triggers to help get a response out of them, such as buying your product or signing up to your membership or whatever it is that you do.

Hopefully these tips can help you focus your marketing strategies a bit more, and as always, if you want some free lessons like the one offered here, make sure you sign up to my free lessons via email.