Link Swap Direct

Welcome to the Marketing Secrets! You will learn all about the different methods for marketing your Internet business. As in the offline world, online marketing comprises free promotions and publicity, as well as paid advertising. Many marketing techniques used by online business professionals – such as writing press releases and conducting media interviews – are borrowed straight from traditional business, so they may seem very familiar. Sometimes traditional marketing techniques are used, but with an online twist, such as sending out press releases via email. However, many marketing techniques used by online business professionals are unique to e-commerce. Search engine submissions, banner ad campaigns, and affiliate networking are all innovative marketing methods that were devised just for Internet businesses. Marketing is a key ingredient to your success, because it is what drives people to your Web site, and having lots of people on your site is the only way to get sales. Start your marketing campaign today. Start applying what you learn, and watch the numbers on your site’s visitor counter go up.

When you have an online store, it’s important to promote it both online and offline. Online promotion involves some relatively new techniques, such as listing your site on search engines and linking your site to various other Web sites. Offline promotion involves the same basic techniques used by traditional offline businesses to generate publicity, such as distributing press releases and soliciting media coverage. Sometimes your online and offline promotions will cross paths; for instance, you might generate a product review in a real-world magazine that also has a Web site, to which your Web site can link to showcase the review. In such a case, you will have reached both an offline and an online audience.

Your ultimate goal is to drive “qualified” traffic to your store. The secret to good promotion is that you always have to directly promote your store to get the desired results. Essentially, there are four topics that you can use to obtain free media coverage for your site:

• 1. Events. Announcing an event, such as a special sale or the debut of a new product, can generate some news.
• 2. Products. You can discuss a specific product; for example, you could release a story on how to use a new type of sports equipment.
• 3. The store itself. You can promote a general story about your store and its basic theme, or a specific listing for the store in a buyer’s guide.
• 4. Yourself. As a storeowner, you might have a unique viewpoint or knowledge worth promoting or being interviewed about.

It is important to understand how promotion achieves publicity, and how publicity achieves sales, because it can influence what types of promotion efforts you undertake. Publicity provides an opportunity for a third party (such as a newspaper or another Website) to generate interest in your store. It’s a chance to receive an implicit or explicit endorsement from another source that people trust or look to for new ideas. In this way, publicity is not just a great method for building trust in your store; it also provides new leads for customers. Publicity can also reinforce existing customers. If someone comes to your site and sees links to reviews of your store and articles that position you as an expert in your field, it provides further comfort and trust. So, publicity allows you to announce your store’s existence and educate new customers about your store, and it also provides customers already coming to the store with corroboration of your store’s capability.

Obtaining publicity, whether online or offline, boils down to four things: organization, effort, creativity, and manners. You must organize a list of targeted places from which you’d like to receive publicity. You then need to deliver to those outlets some type of information that results in a publicity hit. This will require some creativity. It’s not good enough to announce that you have a new Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer in stock; no one cares. On the other hand, if you put out a release saying, “Joe’s Computer Store Offers One Lucky Buyer Ink For a Decade” and run a contest in which buyers could win 40 ink cartridges for the printer of their choice if they buy a new printer, that’s more likely to get a response because it’s newsworthy. With regard to manners, good publicity professionals don’t push their news too aggressively. They don’t flood people with meaningless messages day after day, and they generally provide only information that someone might genuinely be interested in. Reporters, Web site masters, newsletter editors, reviewers, and the like all appreciate anyone who doesn’t waste their time with meaningless drivel. One important way to obtain publicity is to make your site easier to find on the Web. This is the best place to start your publicity drive, because not everyone is going to find your store by typing in a link they found in a newspaper article. They might just go to Google or Yahoo! and type in the name of your store after reading or hearing about you. Thus, before you try to get mentioned in the paper or a magazine or on the radio, ensure that people can find you easily just by searching for you on the Web.

A key part of any free publicity campaign is search engine placement. Search engines today have three key placement issues. The first is getting placed. The second is to be ranked high for the specific types of searches that you think potential customers would use. The third is a new type of listing called a paid search listing, where you pay to be included in search results. To obtain a search engine listing, you must first set up your pages correctly. This means ncluding special information on your pages that provides search engines with a standard description of your site, along with key words related to your site.

Search engine listings can “wear off” with time. As new sites come aboard and other sites gain more popularity, your ranking for various key words on various search engines can drop. The only solution is to monitor your search engine listings and do what you can to improve your ranking, such as resubmitting your site from time to time and tweaking your key words to keep up with the latest services, products, brands, and other words best associated with your store. All search engines and sites are not created equal. Clearly, some sites stand out for their ability to produce customers. A study conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings at the beginning of 2003 measured the amount of traffic on the Web generated specifically by search engines. The winner was Google, although it’s doing even better now. Following Google, in order, were Yahoo!, MSN Search, AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, GoTo.com, InfoSpace, Netscape Search, AltaVista, Lycos, EarthLink Search, and LookSmart. Google is the reigning king of search engines, and it has a unique way of ranking the most relevant site to any particular key word or phrase. The heart of the Google search rankings is that it looks to see how many sites link back to any other site within a given topic. So, a site that has 400 pages linking to it will rank higher on Google than a site that has only 200 pages linking to it. Thus, a linking campaign that gets more and more sites to include you as a link from their pages can be an incredibly effective way to improve your site’s ranking on Google. Google is the highest ranked search engine, so you can see that what started as just a search engine submission exercise has now spawned a secondary task: getting links to your site placed on other sites.

Link placements are when another site links to your site through a solicitation. Link exchanges occur when you exchange a link with another site, providing a link to theirs in exchange for a link to yours. Obtaining either requires diligent work. First, you must locate and research sites that you think have a reason to link to you, and then you must ask them to do so. If they respond that they won’t without a reciprocal link, then you must decide whether you want to provide that. If they don’t require a reciprocal link, then just send them a follow-up thank-you note and move on. The best way to manage an effective linking campaign is to utilize a spreadsheet. Set it up with specific information, do the research, and then code your responses. First, find all the sites you want to contact. Create a nice letter to send, and then work through the list, doing follow-up where necessary. Finally, take stock a couple of weeks later, and decide whether you should do more follow-up, find more sites, and so on. People who are successful with linking constantly repeat this process.