Every Business Should Have Website Marketing
There are many different ways to advertise your business on the Internet. Placing banner ads, orchestrating an email marketing campaign and tactfully mentioning your business on industry related forums and message boards are just a few of the popular options for Internet marketing. Another Internet marketing strategy involves creating and advertising a website to promote your business.
You can use your website in a number of ways. Some of these ways include providing more information about your business and the products or services you offer, letting potential customers know how to reach you and even selling your products and services via the website. This article will highlight the advantages of using a website to market your business and will outline some of the ways the website can be useful.
One great advantage to using a website to market your business on the Internet is that you can place descriptions and photos of the products or services your business offers. This is important because many consumers use the Internet when researching products and services.
Having an online presence gives your business an advantage over the competition because consumers are much more likely to select your products or services over the products and services offered by your competitors who do not advertise online.
Another advantage to marketing your business on a website is you can use the website to not only market but also sell your products directly. Again this can give you an edge over the direct competition.
Consumers who use the Internet to research products and services are often very anxious to make their purchases and they would be more inclined to select a retailer or service providers who offer the opportunity to purchase products or services online over a retailer or service provider who only allows for purchase in a store or via phone.
Still another advantage to using a website to market your business is the ability to reach a large, worldwide audience. The Internet essentially knows no boundaries and advertising on a website means the business owner can reach competitors around the world instead of being limited to their general location.
Advertising via other medium such as television, radio and the print media is somewhat limited and may only reach potential customers in a relatively small geographic area.
Another advantage to using a website to market your business is the Internet is available 24 hours a day around the world. This essentially offers you a storefront which is open 24 hours a day. While your competitors may be limited to their regular business hours, your website will enable you to reach your customers at any hour of the day.
This is especially important for reaching potential customers in other time zones and for reach customers in your own area who are simply too busy to shop for products or services like the ones you offer during regular business hours. Many potential customers work long hours and appreciate the ability to research and shop online after hours.
One final advantage to using a website to market your business is you can actually generate a profit from your website in other ways than through sales to customers. You can also use your website to generate income by selling advertising space to other business owners who are marketing their own products and services on the Internet. However, care should be taken when advertising on your website. First of all you should not sell advertising space to direct competitors.
This is important because this may cause you to lose potential business if potential customers opt to purchase product or services from competitors who advertise on your website. An ideal advertiser is one who offers products and services which do not directly compete with your own products or services but would be of interest to your potential customers.
You should also take care not to place too many advertisements on your website. This is important because too many advertisements may detract from your business and may cause you to lose potential customers.
Terry Detty enjoys quality Internet Advertising along with similar Website Promotion . Great results are seen when this Website Advertising is put to work.
Article Source: http://www.thecontentcorner.com
Using Social Media Marketing To Promote Your Specialist Information Website
Before I get started, it is worth defining social media. It has become a widely used and abused term that means different things to different people.
My definition of social media is:
‘online technologies and practises that people use to share their opinions, insights and experiences with each other. Information can be shared as text, images, audio or video via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social networking sites’.
At the heart of social media is the ability of individuals to interact with other people so that they feel involved and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products, services, events and experiences to like-minded people. This is where social media crosses over with marketing.
Social media can be a great way to have your website promoted by word-of-mouth.
If you can get people to talk about and recommend your services to their peers, it is more powerful than any marketing you can buy. So how can you get started?
How Can You Make Social Media Work for You?
The good news is it is easy to start the process of using social media to promote your website.
1) Create a MySpace Page
MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network. Individuals create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website.
Setting up your own page is simple and free. Go to www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief description about yourself and a link to a more detailed biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of this page is to drive people to your own site so make sure you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting your website.
Spend an hour every week developing your site and building your list of friends. Invite relevant people to comment about your website.
2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages
A big part of the social web is the ability for people to build lists of their favourite sites or articles. People with similar interests can then share their lists and benefit from other people’s recommendations. If your website has free content, you should make these articles easy to bookmark or add to favourites lists. There are a lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks. You can add links to these sites to your article pages.
There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. The ones that you should include are:
• Digg - www.digg.com
• Technorati – www.technorati.com
• Del.icio.us – www.del.icio.us
• Reddit – www.reddit.com
However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com (www.addthis.com) on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.
3) Add an RSS Feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to be notified every time new articles are added to your website so they can keep up to date with your content.
Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the letters RSS in white.
Publish your RSS feeds at Feedburner (www.feedburner.com) to encourage distribution and interest.
4) Email to a Friend
Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is not typically bundled under the heading of social media marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage people to share and recommend your content. Add an ‘Email a Friend’ link to all of your content pages.
5) Add a Forum
Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum will both give you a chance to understand what people are discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own comments.
The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments so they don’t feel they are being censored, but you have to stamp out aggressive behaviour, personal insults, spam and meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so don’t bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it properly.
Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin (www.vbulletin.com). More technical people can use a free opensource solution such as PHPBB (www.phpbb.com).
You can register your forum with BoardTracker (www.boardtracker.com) to make it easier for people to find.
6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos
It has never been easier to create short videos that can demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular. For example, if your website is about Making Money on eBay, you could create a short video on “How to Take Perfect Photos for Your eBay Listings”. Make sure you have your website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your video to promote your website.
Post your videos on YouTube (www.youtube.com) and Google Videos (http://video.google.com/). Give it a catchy title and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the videos from your own website.
7) Share Your Photos
If you have photos related to your subject area, post them on photo sharing websites such as Flikr (www.flikr.com) and PhotoBucket (www.photobucket.com). For example, if your website is about steam trains, take a camera to your next steam train show and post the pictures on these sites. People searching for steam train images are likely to try these sites. They can then follow the link on the photo to your website. P.S. Remember to include links back to your own site from the images.
Create a Blog
Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles are listed one after the other on the home page. They are usually used to write about current events or comment on news.
Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments. Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly lose their audience.
Use the blog to drive traffic to your main website.
You can get basic blogging software for free. Try Wordpress (www.wordpress.com) or Blogger (www.blogger.com). For a managed service, try Typepad (www.typepad.com).
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In many ways, today’s social media technologies are still fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the phenomenon that they have created – of customers taking control of the buying process – is here to stay. Customers will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers and anyone else with customers better start listening to what they are saying.
One last point before I finish. It’s really a word of warning. Once you adopt the social media marketing techniques, you are inviting people to comment about your service. You must be ready for negative as well as positive feedback. Good companies listen to the feedback and make positive changes. Poor companies ignore it or worse still, call their lawyers to fight it.
If you jump into the social media world, be ready to participate, listen, learn and take action.
Article Source: http://www.approvedarticles.com
