Personal Blog of Forest Marie

A Website is the basic means to creating your online presence. If you have no clue on how to get started with building your own site, you should not miss this article.

1. Planning a website: Before you start learning how to build a site, you must know your objective of getting a site. There can be multiple objectives but you need to know the main reason. Is it to provide information to potential customers? Is it to perform ecommerce transactions? Is it to promote your offline business? Is it to educate people on your industry? Is it to provide service to your customers and partners? Find the answers to these questions. This will help you to decide on the design components on your site.

2. The importance of design: Depending on the purpose, the site layout and design need to be thought out differently. If you intend to build an information rich site, then you need to build in ease of navigation and provision to add and modify categories. If you are developing an ecommerce site, then you need to build in a shopping cart and a product catalogue. It is a good idea to check out other sites, especially those in the same industry as yours to develop some kind of framework.

3. The simple site: Now you might decide to have a simple site under 10 pages which carries the basic information like about us, products, and contact info. Many web hosting companies would be able to help you get a basic site up so long as you can provide the content to fill in. In addition, they will also host your site for a small fee of less than $10 a month. If you simply want a web presence initially, then this is the way to go.

4. The full blown site: To develop a full fledged site for your company you will need to hire web designers to develop the pages. If you can plan out the contents and the sections, then it is possible to do the job in-house. But if you have other priorities, then you can outsource the work. Some companies offer content based site development packages for about $299. You can check them out because they come with built in tools that will help to improve your site ranking in search engines. Moreover, they will also give you tools like autoresponders, email accounts, templates and much more.

Once you get your basic site up, you will need to promote it heavily. You can do the promotions online as well as offline. On the internet, you can use PPC ads, article marketing, forum marketing and video marketing. On the offline side, you can use the URL on business cards, banners and hoardings. Ensure that your site provides quality content for your target audience. So those are the simple steps you need to follow to start your website.

Business Internet Marketing, online marketing

One of the reasons why internet businesses find it difficult to sell their products online is simply because they are trying to sell their products. On the internet, you don’t sell products, you buy products. So instead of spending your efforts in selling products you need to spend you efforts in generating traffic for your site and let the people buy your products. It is a different paradigm out here.

The story does not stop after getting the prospect to your site. You need to further engage him in innovative activities that will keep him hooked to your site. Traffic does not mean getting one person to visit your site, it means that he keep coming back for more information. That is the way to build traffic. If you get 100 visitors on one day and another 100 on the next, then there is no difference. But if 50 people from the first day also come back on the second day, then you have traffic of 150.

Now if you are offering something new each day, there is a reason for the person to come back for more. So how do you increase traffic for your site? I will tell you a few ways.

1. Blogging: The basic principle of attracting traffic is to find out where people spend most of their time. One of the places which are popular is blogs, which are nothing but online journals. Anyone can start his own blog. But if your blog carries quality content which attracts visitors, then you can divert them to your site. The way to go about is to post a new blog posting 2-3 times a week at the minimum. If you can do more, better it is.

2. Social networks: Just as the blogs are getting popular, the social media sites are sure to overtake them in popularity. In fact, Facebook is one of the top 5 sites in terms of traffic ranking. Almost everyone has a profile on Facebook. People join various groups and communities related to their work, city or school. Many spend more than an hour on Facebook everyday. So sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg attract huge traffic which you can divert to your site. Simply find opportunities to share your link and let the viral propagation takes its course.

3. Site tools: Apart from blogs and social networks, there are many things that can be done on your site end to increase traffic. Most important is to provide quality content and update regularly. Search engines love original content. Make sure you do some keyword optimization and HTML code tuning. Use a RSS feed to send out your latest news to feed engines that will publish your feeds all over the internet. Use pop-ups on your site to convert visitors. You can configure a pop-up to appear whenever the user is trying to close the window. Use video or audio introductions for your company. Many people prefer to watch and listen rather than simply read your site.

Always remember that blogging and other means can bring new people to your site, but if you are not providing them a reason to come back, then you cannot increase the traffic significantly.

Business Internet Marketing, online marketing

There is great news for you if you do not have the money to blow on television and newspaper ads for promoting your products. Go online! The internet is the place to advertise your products and reach the message to your target audience with great accuracy and least cost. What with all the social networking sites, you have access to niche communities and a global audience; you will never have to worry over spending money on your advertisement campaigns. However, there are a few things you need to get in place before you can start.

1. Have your own blog: A blog is your online identity. You might have a Facebook profile or a MySpace profile but it is better to have an independent blog for yourself where you can control a lot many things. I recommend using WordPress because it integrates well with all the social networks and gives better flexibility and reach. However, you can choose any of the several blogging platforms available.

2. Have an Opt-in form: All marketing efforts are directed at increasing the number of prospects and your blog will serve as a great platform for this. You must include an opt-in form on your blog that captures the visitor’s name and email id. The placement of this opt-in form is crucial. Good positions are the top side left or right positions as they give maximum visibility. You can even put the form on the home page of your business site and important inner pages, especially the product pages.

3. Offer a freebie: Why should any prospect simply give you his email id? That’s a good question and the correct answer is that because you are offering an exciting freebie in return. It can be an e-book with your greatest material which you would have loved to sell. But you need to give it free to get that valuable email id.

4. Set up an autoresponder: An autoresponder will help you to store all the email ids collected from the opt-in list, organize them and use them to send messages about your products. You can program it to send welcome messages as soon as a visitor opts in through your blog. Later you can send scheduled broadcasts and updates to start the selling process.

5. Integrate a shopping cart: If you intend to sell your products online, then you will need a shopping cart. It will help to transfer funds that you receive from your customers. Many shopping carts have a built in autoresponder for sending confirmations and order tracking messages.

With these 5 things in place, you are ready to begin your marketing campaign.

Business Internet Marketing, online marketing

An internet home based business or an affiliate business is all about volume. More the leads and people you can contact, more the revenue you can earn. The primary means of lead generation is collecting emails and communicating the product message to those interested. However, when your email contacts run into hundreds, you start having problems in responding to each of them personally. The problems become unmanageable when your contacts run into thousands.

Every email user knows that checking emails and replying to them is a time consuming process. While it is important to reply to each lead or customer, you do not have the physical time or energy to do that. Moreover, who will look after the other marketing activities? Well, the good news is that you can use computer software programs called Autoresponders to simplify and relieve your email workload. Autoresponders can handle large amounts of email receiving and replying based on the settings that you determine.

Commercial autoresponders allow you to create templates for various purposes and also help you set up email campaigns or schedule your email sending. Here are some of the things you can do with them.

• New visitors: Whenever you have a new site visitor who leaves his or her email, you can set your autoresponder to send a welcome message thanking him for his interest and explaining in brief about your business and products. You can even personalize the email by including the prospect’s name in various sentences throughout the email. I have always been amazed with this feature because it seems that the email has been specially written for you.

• Existing customers: You can use the autoresponder to send out product upgrade information or bug fix reports incase you are selling software. You can announce information on any upcoming events or seminars that you are organizing and send out a personalized invitation to each customer.

• Leads: It is important to keep constantly in touch with your leads but you must also take care not to spam their inbox. So you can set the autoresponder to send scheduled newsletters or emails once a week or once a month depending on your requirements. You can even set priorities based on whether the prospect has opened your email or simply deleted it.

• Campaign: From time to time, you might need to run email campaigns to promote your latest products or seasonal offers. You can use autoresponders for this by creating a template and shooting it off to email ids based on various criteria like people who visited you in the past 3 months or people who have replied to you at least once.

There are many companies that provide autoresponders. One of the most popular ones is AWeber. Make your purchase only after trying the software for the trial period and see whether you are comfortable using it. Autoresponders can help to increase your productivity drastically and improve customer loyalty.

Internet Marketing autoresponder, Internet Marketing

The internet connects multitudes of people across the globe. The people come together and form online communities called forums related to their common interests. People share their concerns, opinions and even advice on the chosen subject and interact with other people in a global hangout. Forums have therefore emerged as another marketing medium for internet marketers.

First of all, you must search for forums which are related to your business interests. You can use any search engine to do that. Chances are that you will get a list of thousands of forums. Another way is to use forum directories which have indexed lists of forums on all myriad subjects.

Your objective is to provide a link to your site on these forums therefore, it is important to find out whether you are allowed to do so. Some forums do not allow posting of links and are as such not suitable for your purpose even if the forum has a large following. Read the forum’s terms of agreement to find out about this. You can even see in general if you find other members posting their links on the forum.

One of the important objectives is to build your reputation on these forums as an expert in your field. So initially, you can simply read what others are talking about, what kind of questions they are asking and what kind of problems they are facing. Become friendly with people by helping them in small matters. Use your knowledge and insights to guide them or provide solutions to their problems. Do not give an answer just for the sake of giving it but only when you know that it is the right answer. Otherwise, you will harm your budding reputation.

Even though you intend to promote your products, it is not wise to talk about them directly. People come to forums to connect not to buy and sell. So if you start promoting your products, people might be put off. The rule of forum etiquette is not to spam. Even when you are starting your own thread, provide only useful informative content and do not go on adding pages just for the heck of it.

For the same reasons as above, ensure that your link connects to your squeeze page or your profile page on squidoo or facebook. Even if you are selling an affiliate product, you need to ensure this as it will help to get you leads that you can then contact and talk shop.

Forum marketing is a great way to build your reputation but it also depends on the choice of your forums and the quality of content that you provide. Join forums that have thousands of active members so that your message reaches a wide audience and provide only high quality advice.

Internet Marketing forum marketing, Internet Marketing