How to Market Your Web Site

September 12, 2006 2:49 pm by Jarom Adair

A Practical Approach to Choosing the Best Marketing Methods

There are so many ways to market a web site that it’s important to have a focused strategy. If you don’t know the correct and best ways to market your site, you’ll end up spending a lot of time and money on pursuits that give you only marginal success. Picking the correct strategy, on the other hand, will maximize your efforts and bring in the best return on the time and money you invest.

How do you know what the best strategy for your particular situation is? After developing marketing strategies for dozens of companies, I have found a couple of basic marketing methods work well in a variety of situations…

Know Your Customers

Any marketing strategy can be broken down by the customers your are trying to attract. After all, if you have no customers you make no money. If you make no money, you have no business. Keeping this in mind, it is best that your marketing strategy revolve around what will attract your ideal customers to your site.

Notice that you’re looking for your “ideal” customers, not “the most” customers or just “any” customers. The first step in a good marketing strategy is to know exactly who you’re marketing to and how to best speak to that market. This is the most critical step in the whole process. You can read about it in detail in the article “3 Things You’d Better Know About Your Customers“. If you haven’t read that article yet, I highly suggest you do that before continuing below.

Choosing the Best Marketing Methods

One way to decide how to market your service or product is to understand whether you need to attract many customers or just a few. Some businesses need to attract throngs of customers to keep revenue coming in. Others need a couple key clients a month. Different marketing methods work for each.

The Number of Customers You Need:

“I Need to Attract a Lot of Customers”

If you need to cast a broad net to bring in many customers, the internet offers some great opportunities. This section is for businesses that offer products that can be shipped to any mailbox or information that can be downloaded from any internet connection. These items are usually lower priced and appeal to a wide audience.

Lower priced means that you probably don’t need to spend a whole lot of money building your web site. Don’t build a large elaborate site or go into too much detail–people just want enough information to make a decision on whether to buy or not and then to proceed quickly. Therefor just give them the necessary information and make it easy to buy. Tom Antion, a recent acquaintance of mine, makes over $75,000 a month selling $10~$20 knick-knacks on hundreds of low-cost sites. His main areas of focus, and what I’d recommend looking into first, is

• Pay-Per-Click: marketing through search engines using pay-per-click will get you in front of a wide audience very quickly, and if you use the right wording the people who come to your site will be ready to buy what you offer

• Search Engine Optimization: for a broad market there’s nothing better than to have your site appear near the top of a search engine for the key words people use to search for what you offer. To learn about optimizing your web site for search engines, download this power point presentation on Search Engine Optimization (note: right click on the link and choose “save link as”. Also know that this presentation was first given to executives at a religious institution, so religious material is present.)
  

To help you be more effective with search engines, there are a couple things that are very helpful. To the right is an intro to the the Keyword Selector Tool. I will be referring to Overture later on, so I’ve placed it in a separate box. For businesses who want to attract large numbers of people the terms that appear near the top of the list are the most searched for terms.

• Selecting Keywords: While the popular terms at the top of the Keyword Selector Tool will bring a lot of traffic, be aware that the more people there are who search for a particular term the higher the competition will be to get your business in the top slots. This means it will cost more per click (pay-per-click) or take more time and effort (natural listings) to rise to the top. You might try looking at terms farther down the list that draw fewer searches. You won’t get as much traffic, but the pay-per-click price will be lower and it will be easier to rise in the natural listings for those terms. For example, you may be in the real estate business trying to attract people who are interested in learning real estate. “Foreclosure” is a highly searched for term, but lower down on the list is “how to buy foreclosure” and “buy foreclosure home” (read: “buy a home in foreclosure”–search words aren’t always in order and small words like “a” and “in” are left out). The people who search using these terms are probably more your target market and there will be less competition over these terms than there would be for the term “foreclosure”.

• Niche Marketing: Inside the large group of people you’re trying to attract there are smaller sets that would use what you sell in for different reasons. You can create different sites built specifically to rank well for particular search terms and are geared towards those smaller sets of people.

• Site Testing: It’s a good idea to try out a number of pay-per-click campaigns, see which ones bring in the most qualified leads (i.e. which ones bring you the sales), refine your site till it sells to a good percentage of those who come to your site through pay-per-click, and then optimize your site so you rise in the natural rankings for those pay-per-click keywords that are working the best. Or, in non run-on sentence form: find what works well in pay-per-click and optimize your site for those terms.

• Community Building If you serve a group of people who are dedicated to a product you sell or an industry you support, you may consider building an online bulletin board where people can talk and exchange information. These things require monitoring and moderating, but can be a great resource for your customers and visitors and can help you keep in tune with your customer’s needs.

• Other Methods: You can try banner ads on web sites, sending email blasts to targeted email lists, and a host of other offline marketing venues. Blogs and email newsletters, mentioned below, may play a part too. Just remember to find out what works well on a small scale before you try to get a ton of people to your site. That’s why pay-per-click can be so helpful–it allows you to test your site and your message in a fast and inexpensive way.
  

“I Need Relatively Few Customers”

If you need a relatively small number of customers to be in business you need to approach marketing online in a different way. Chances are you have a higher-end, more expensive product or service. The internet offers great opportunities to build your brand and help land important customers.

Quality, integrity, and value is likely more important than price and speed in this situation. This is where you don’t want to skimp on the web site. You’re building a brand and company your customers can rely on–you’ll need a web site that portrays that message. These customers probably need more time to make a decision, so it is important to keep in touch with them. They would probably like to have a lot of information on your offering, so it’s important to have information available. There are a couple of activities that will help you provide information and keep in touch with your perspective customers while you gain their trust and inspire confidence, thereby winning them over:

• Blogs: Blogs, especially those written by CEO’s, are very good at helping a business gain the trust and loyalty of those who visit a web site. Blogs, accompanied by email newsletters, are a great way to keep in touch with clients and potential clients. Read more about blogs under “What is a Blog and How can it Help My Business?“.

• Email Newsletter When you sell a more expensive product or service, there is often a lot of information associated with it’s purchase. Your clients may have many questions before and after a purchase, and an email newsletter is a good way to help answer those questions.

  A feature called “autoresponders” make it possible for you to send an emails to prospective clients or new clients in a specific order and timing. For example, you can send an email to a prospective customer with specific information that prospective customers usually ask for, and then a day after that automatically send a follow-up email with the answers to common questions, and then a week after that automatically send an email with additional features and benefits or a special offer.

  Once they become a paying customer you can automatically add them to a “paying customer” list, take them off the “perspective customer” list, and send them a series of emails at specific intervals to help them make full use of their purchase. Find more information about how to use email under “Email Marketing for Businesses“.

• Members Area: Having an area where customers can log in to access account information, use proprietary tools, or receive special information and deals will help sell your product or service as well as give customers additional reasons to stay with your company.

• Site Testing: Since you can’t afford to turn customers off while perfecting your site, it’s a good idea to run your site past some of the people in your target market before going live. A good method for testing your site with your target market is described in the article “My Site Isn’t Selling Anything!!” under the “Target Customers” section.
  

Combinations of the Tools Above

The great thing about internet marketing is that one activity usually supports others. If you don’t find yourself drawn to the “many customers” or “few customers” approach, there are many options that pick tools from both.

• Blogs and Search Engines: If you start a blog or an online community, search engines usually pick up on that content and bring more people to your site.

• Niches, Pay-Per-Click, and Email Newsletters: If you create a good niche site or a successful pay-per-click campaign, you can likely capture those people in an email list.

• Blogs, Email Newsletters, and Search Engines: You can use the “Keyword Selector Tool” (introduced in the green box above) to see what people are searching for, find a phrase and write a blog article on that subject to attract people via search engines (e.g. “buy foreclosure home” example above), and then send the article out to your email list.
  

I hope this helps you get an idea how to start marketing your business online. This approach is based on your customers. Later we’ll explore how to use the internet to analyze your competitors.