It isn't enough to have a website for your business. Even if your website is fantastic and has all kinds of genius functionality, there still comes the question of how to drive tons of traffic to it. Web design, web development and web marketing are all three distinctly different technologies, and serve different roles when it comes to your online business. The focus of this article is web marketing. Once your site is built, that should be your main focus, because that is how you are going to get customers and sales.
There are 10 major categories you must know about, and should be ideally expert in, when it comes to web marketing.
1. Blog Marketing
2. Article Marketing
3. Directory Submission
4. Email Marketing
5. Local Online Marketing
6. Pay Per Click Advertising
7. Press Releases
8. Social Bookmarking
9. Social Networking
10. Video Marketing
Blog Marketing is internet marketing using blogs. It consists of having a blog, if you don't have one already, writing informative content, submitting your blog to directories, ensuring the blog search engines know about your blog and each new article you write. This is a great way to get your business listed in search engines and discovered by internet users.
Article Marketing is important to increase the visibility and the credibility of your company. By writing intelligent and informative articles about your own areas of expertise and submitting your articles correctly to the correct article directories, you can see a marked improvement in your online traffic.
Directory Submission, done properly and by hand, can be a very tedious exercise. There are many thousands of directories you could submit your website to, but not all are the RIGHT directories. Some are free, some are not, some are niche-specific. The most important thing is to get your website listed in the largest and most important directories like DMOZ, and then go from there to the smaller and more specific directories. As a note, it's important that you read each directory's terms so that you do it correctly. An incorrect submission will not improve your search engine rankings.
Email Marketing will save your life. Without an organized mailing list and email subscription service with the ability to write to your entire address book at once, send automated thank you emails, weekly or monthly newsletters, etc.,it is next to impossible to stay in touch with everyone, unless it's all you do. And as a business owner, you certainly have a lot more to do than that. You can search the internet for a service that fulfills your needs as a business owner, then you'll just pay a small monthly fee and be able to write emails that automatically get sent to your customers at various times like as soon as they sign up for your newsletter, and once a week after that. You can set this up however you like, but once it's set up it will always work and that saves you a LOT of writing.
Local Online Marketing is best when you have a local business and want to drive local traffic to drive to your site. For example, if you actually have a physical location, storefront, restaurant, etc. you're going to want to get yourself known in the local community and get local traffic to your site. A good idea is to create a profile for your company on Yelp.com so that local internet users can find you quickly. Local pay per click advertising can be extremely rewarding as well, although it is not a free service.
Press Releases get your business' news known about among the online publications and media websites. This can be VERY successful in driving traffic to your site.
Social Bookmarking is a free and wonderful way to share your web pages with the world and become part of a gigantic network of people with similar interests to yours, whether business or personal. It makes it easy for members of social bookmarking websites to find your business by searching keywords. There are many, many of these sites and it's important to get your web pages on as many of them as you can. The more exposure the better.
Social Networking may be the single most important online marketing activity you could engage in as a business owner. This includes creating profiles for your business on as many social networks as possible, creating groups, adding your profile to correct categories so that people know what kind of a business you have and can find you with a correct keyword search, finding members of the social networks with similar interests, making new contacts and keeping in touch with them. It can be a lot of work, but it puts you rapidly in contact with hundreds, thousands, millions of people you would never be able to locate otherwise.
Video Marketing is a great way to get your business seen and create tons of traffic to your website. Youtube, for example, has so many members, it's possible for an interesting, correctly categorized and tagged video to be seen hundreds of thousands of times in a week. Nothing communicates to a raised-on-tv population faster than video.
There are a lot of specifics, how to's on each of the above 10 categories, and they will be the subject of many more articles to come. These are just some general tips, ideas and suggestions that will definitely increase your online presence and traffic.
Bill Mcintosh has been expertly driving traffic to his own online businesses for over 10 years. Now he shares his knowledge with the world to create good karma. He is the founder of the Website Marketing Dream Team a team of experts who take care of all your online marketing for you.
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