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Marketing your online business to the world
If you have already have an offline business, or have started a business before, then it should come as no surprise to you that you will need to devote considerable efforts to marketing your newly published online business. If you have never started or run a business, then you should be aware that simply publishing a Web site on the Internet will be a waste of time, unless you back it up with some significant marketing efforts. Marketing online consists of getting your Web site listed with the major search engines and online directories; sending direct e-mails; notifying news publications through press releases; and running banner advertising campaigns. Additionally, many online marketers have found that they can generate significant online traffic using traditional offline media, like direct mail, radio commercials, and television advertisements. Notifying Internet portals and directories Once you have published your Web site, it's time to begin the marketing process. Your first step will be to get listed with the large portals, or search engines, like Yahoo!, Excite and Lycos. You also will want to get listed with many of the lesser known directories that can steer more traffic, or prospects, to your Web site. Before you begin this process, make sure that your Web site is very close to being final and you have created some good written descriptions for your online business. Backtracking from this point can be very time consuming. Like registering your domain name (www.yourbiz.com), getting listed with the portals and directories can be done easily using an auto-posting service. You simply type, or cut and paste, the keywords and description for your online business in the appropriate boxes of the notification forms, and the auto-posting service will take care of the rest. In addition to getting your Web site listed across the Internet, many of these services will also analyze your site for loading speed, browser compatibility, and its ability to distinguish itself from the "crowd." There a few popular auto-posting services that will take care of the registration process for you, including those shown in the following table.
Getting listed with portals, search engines and directories is the beginning of your promotional campaign. By having your site properly indexed in these search engines, you stand a good chance of getting some visitors to your site. However, don't expect to have the world knocking at your door just because you have gotten your site listed in all of the major search engines. As you can imagine, the competition to be listed in the top spots is fierce, and the search engines are struggling to keep up with the thousands of new sites that are coming online almost daily. Finally, you should be aware that even after you submit your freshly minted site to the various portals, there will be a time lag before your site is indexed. This lag results because your site will either have to be reviewed by human eyes or be visited by a software spider to see that it actually exists. With some search engines this process can take as long as eight weeks. Promoting your site with press releases and direct mail By now you have created a Web site, published it with a Web hosting service, and gotten it listed with the major portals and online directories. Your job is finished, right? Wrong! Within a few days of registering your site, you're asking yourself why the reports from your Web hosting service still aren't showing any appreciable increase in traffic, or hits? In fact, except for a few "spider robots," you seem to be the only one visiting the site! Now it's time to start actively promoting your site to bring in prospects. If you have ever conducted any promotion in the real, or offline, world, then you are already familiar with some of the concepts and methods, including: press releases and direct mailings. However, marketing on the Internet introduces some nuances that you must understand before you can begin your promotional campaign. Start with a press release to the major publications in your industry. If you can spare a few extra bucks, there are online services that will take care of the entire distribution process for you. For instance, there is the Internet News Bureau, that "distributes press releases via e-mail to more than 2,600 journalists throughout the world." Another alternative is to create an e-mailing list of prospective customers for your products and services. Send them your press release and any other material, like a newsletter, that might get them to visit your site. You should be aware that sending a lot of unsolicited e-mail, often called "spam" in the online world, can have detrimental effects on your online business. Therefore, make sure that your mailing list was developed from prospects that authorized you to send them e-mail. Running banner advertising campaigns After you have gotten your online business listed with the major portals and directories, sent out a press release announcing your new venture, and started to collect the names and e-mail addresses of visitors to your site, then it's time to consider some online advertising. Probably the most popular method of online advertising is through the use of banner ads. These are the advertisements, most often in rectangular boxes, that seem to appear on almost every page you look at on the Web. In addition to banner ads, some other ways you can advertise your online business include having your ad placed with a newsletter distribution service, and inserting your domain name (www.yourbiz.com) in offline advertisements. If you are unfamiliar with the process of running a banner ad, then you'll be surprised at how fast you can actually start pulling in visitors with this medium. While in the offline world it can take months to actually get your advertisement placed in a publication, in the online world the whole process can be accomplished in a matter of days. Another advantage of online advertising is that you can change your ad in the middle of a campaign. For instance, if your graphics or message are not generating an acceptable click-through rate, then you can change the entire banner in an effort to attract more visitors. The cost of running banner ads ranges from free to thousands of dollars per month. Some of the popular banner advertising services are shown in the following table.
In order to create an appropriate banner ad, you can either do it yourself, or have one created by an outside agency. There are many services online that you can use to create a banner ad for free, like Quick Banner. Alternatively, LinkExchange provides a "pay" service from an outside agency that you can use when you register with their network. Finally, many of the off-the-shelf software packages include tools to design banner ads, like the Microsoft FrontPage Image Editor. Affiliate programs offer you a way to make money for your online business by advertising for other online businesses. In their simplest form, affiliate programs establish a business relationship between your business and another business, where you will receive a percentage, or a fee, for the sales that you generate for the other business. In a sense, by joining an affiliate program, you become an agent for another business and get a commission every time you sell something for that business. For instance, let's say that you joined an affiliate program that paid you a 15% commission on every sale that you made. If you sold an item worth $100, then you would receive a $15 commission from the affiliate program. In order to join an affiliate program and begin earning commissions, you will be required to show a banner ad, or text link, for the other business on your Web site. For instance, if you join the Amazon.com affiliate program, you would place an Amazon.com banner ad on your Web site, with a special identification code, that links back to the Amazon.com site. You can locate many of the large affiliate programs by visiting some of the following Affiliate program administrators.
You can also set-up your own affiliate program to enlist other online businesses to help you sell your products and services. In this instance, you would pay affiliates a percentage of sales, or a flat fee, for every sale they made for your online business. If you want to learn more about setting up an affiliate program for your online business, go to ClickTrade. This company can help you set-up and administer an affiliate program for your Web site.
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