Home To Swedish Main Page Technical Documentation and Translation Technical Information Running a small business Producing websites Marketing Methods About Myself Downloads

Marketing Methods How does one market one´s business on the Internet? Well, there are a few methods. Some are good and some are bad, depending on what kind of merchandise or services you offer. Some of them cost money, others don´t. For businesses, the web is primarily an opportunity to show a shop window to the whole world, not just the neighborhood. As such, it is a great tool. Something like this has never existed before. On top of this, you can often, but not always, make the actual sales transaction over the web as well. So, what options have you got? Pay Per Click (PPC) pay per action paid search inclusion Search Engine Optimization link exchanges email newsletter ads sponsorships article writing press releases affiliate programs forum postings offline promotions.

Pay Per Click (PPC) The Google favorite, which you can read more about on the Google website (of course!) but also on the page "Advertising on Google". It is also used by most other search engines. Your ad shows up on the first page of the search results on the search engine of your choice, whenever the visitor uses certain keywords and phrases. You then pay for every time someone clicks on your link. The real challenge here is to select those keywords and phrases that will generate, not necessarily the most number of clicks, but the most number of transactions per click. Read for instance "Marketing smarter with Google". There is a draw-back with this scheme. You normally budget for a certain number of clicks per day, so as not to ruin yourself if your ad turns out to be popular. So, your ad shows up every time the visitors use "your" keywords and phrases, until that number of clicks have been reached. Then the ad disappears, until the next day. This means that your competitors (or someone else) might spend time clicking on your ad until it disappears for this reason. It would thus cost you money to no avail. Pay per Action There are schemes where you can pay for actions other than having a person just click on your link. These schemes are sometimes more relevant to your business, as they are more likely to lead to concrete business transactions. You can read more on the web, for instance on the Business Objects website. Paid Search Inclusion Not all search engines have this option. As of this writing, Yahoo uses this scheme. You simply pay what amounts to advertising costs to have your link presented in a prominent place among the search hits, when certain keywords or phrases are used. The more keywords or phrases you select, the more it costs. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) This option means that you work with the text on your website so that the keywords which you consider to be most important appear as often and as prominently as possible. There are two thing to consider here. On the one hand, you want your webpages to be as appealing reading as possible to your visitors. And constant repetition of certain words or concepts don´t make for good reading, it will drive the visitors off. On the other hand, search engines count the number of appearances of certain keywords and phrases when they index your page, in order to decide its ranking when these keywords or phrases are used by visitors to the search engines. There have been many schemes invented to deal with this issue, and most of them are now obsolete, since search engines have become smarter and don´t fall for these tricks anymore. There are firms who specialize in writing your web text for, designed to give you a higher ranking on the search results. You can either hire one of them, or decide to tackle the issue yourself. There is a lot to learn in this field; how to compose your website so that it gets a high search ranking. Link Exchanges There are a number of websites which arrange for exchange of links and/or banners. As a member, you promise to expose other members links and/or banners on your site, and you will get corresponding exposure on other members´ websites, usually on a rotating scheme. These websites fall into these categories: They are free for members; they live on their advertising revenues. The members can even make money if they help to drive business to other menbers. There is a membership fee. Members are categorized into certain groups, depending on what kind of business they are in. Thus, if you sell skis, you can join a group that only have dealers of sport equipment as members. The advantage of link exchanges is two-fold: You get increased exposure through the other members´ websites. You can get higher search engine rankings because there are more links on other websites pointing at your site. There is, however, a bit of moral involved in this. You should read what James Huggins writes about not participating in Link Exchanges.

E-mail Newsletter Ads There are a number of interest groups and commercial websites that regurlarly send out free newsletters in the form of e-mails to their subscribers. These are not spam, since they only reach subscribers, who have an opportunity to discontinue this service whenever they want. Providing ad space in their e-mails is a good way for these publishers to receive money so they can go on providing this service. And it is a good venue for you to get added exposure, provided that the target audience is just the right one. Sponsorships This sounds like somebody else paying for your ads. Well, Google refer to the pay-per-click-ads appearing at right on their search result pages as being "sponsored". By whom? Presumably, they mean that these ads would cost you a lot more, were it not for their ability to earn money from other sources, apart from selling advertising space. Article Writing This is my personal favorite, as you might have noticed if you have looked around on this website. I write articles and publish on webpages, articles about subjects that interest me, and hopefully are enlightening or usefull to you. All webpages on a website that have links to them from other "found" pages do, of course, get indexed by visiting search engines. If it is an "odd" subject, that not many people write about, that page will get a high search ranking whenever relevant keywords are used by the searcher. You can, of course, write about any subject that you are very familiar with. Sharing your knowledge on the web is a good deed to your fellow man, it will give you good Karma! But if you write about things that are highly relevant to your business, you will get better search rankings as well, since you will be using the "right" keywords and phrases a lot on that page. Press Releases If you can get journalists on periodicals to write about you or your products or services, and if these articles are then published on their websites, preferably free to the readers, you will get a lot of free exposure. The trick is to have newsworthy things happen in your field of business, and being quick to exploit these "happenings" when they happen. So; Make a list of all periodicals which are of interest to your prospective customers, and which publish their articles on the web. Write to these periodicals whenever something newsworthy happens. Link to their articles when they get published. Affiliate Programs There are a lot of these, with the common theme that you share the sales revenues resulting from your advertising with the website owner who carries your ads. See for instance Adwordsexpert´s website for more info about their scheme. Forum Postings "Forum" is the old latin word for "market place", and there are websites dedicated to certain products, which they write articles about and accept ads for. Writing articles for them, and placing ads there, are usually good ways to get exposure. Offline Promotions This does not seem to be web-related, so I will not comment.

Webmarketing is getting harsher every day. Ad prices are up. Visitors rarely buy. Pay-per-click bids are insane… but only the top ten advertisers in each category matter to the customers. The rest don´t get much traffic at all. Which is good for big operators which can afford to be visible (they will grow) but not so good for the small operators. You need to focus on accountability and improving the return on your marketing investment (ROI, Return on Investment). What’s needed is a system to help you spend less money on traffic and consistently convert more clicks into sales. ESA/T, which stands for Enhance, Select, Analyze, and Test, has been used with great success for several years by a few online marketers.

The four-step ESA/T cycle works like this: Enhance the visitor’s experience of your web site. This will ensure the traffic being driven to the site can be converted into sales and actions. Select traffic sources and marketing strategies wisely. Analyze your website statistics and ROI tracking data using metrics appropriate for your business. Test and tweak to improve performance. Using your metrics, find what isn’t working and fix it.

These four steps can be repeated over and over in a dialectic spiral towards optimum marketing performance. Step 1. Enhance Before spending another dime on driving traffic to your website, you must make sure that your visitors will land in an website environment that is professional-looking, relaxing and does not make them think twice about doing business with you. Good website usability is a process, not a state. It is not only prices and merchandise or services that might change over time, but also ideas of how to improving your website. If you can’t afford an industrial strength usability makeover, use baby steps. Asking your grandmother to buy something on your website and watching her do it is a good budget alternative. Step 2. Select The next step in ESA/T cycle is “S” – Select your advertising sources. Look at the possible marketing and advertising strategies above. Some of them cost money, others just cost time and effort. Your goal is to develop the marketing mix that’s just right for you. The blend that brings you the right amount of sales for the right price. Be creative and methodical. An often-heard advice is to make advanced searches on Google or Yahoo to find the sites linking to your competitors. This will seed your list of possible places to advertise. Next, develop a list of your company’s internal resources – advertising budget, human resources, and time. Based on that, create a plan for working with the traffic sources from your list.

Step 3. Analyze Then we come to Analyze, and it is all about tracking and analyzing the kind of visitor activity that’s relevant to your bottom line. There are plenty of metrics to choose from. Be sure to avoid the “information glut” and use only the metrics that will help you improve your website´s usability and traffic quality. Some of such metrics may include: The number of orders placed, average dollar value per order, average revenue earned per visitor, number of registrations, number of specific page views like product detail pages, time elapsed between first visit and first order, visitors’ paths through the site, and so on. Cumulative statistics for all visitors on your site are of course important, but in order to be of real value to you, these statistics should be tallied for individual traffic sources so you can compare and contrast their performance. Step 4. Test Remember the last time you wanted to buy something online and gave up? Remember the reason why? It was likely because the checkout process was confusing, didn’t answer your questions, or the whole process just took too long time. Patience is not a virtue that web-users cultivate very much. If that website’s marketing manager used ESA/T, especially Test, you likely would have completed your purchase and would be enjoying it today. Instead, that business not only lost a sale, but likely lost you as a customer forever. Plot a bar chart showing the number of unique visitors and page reloads at each step of your checkout process. Suppose you observe a sharp drop in the number of visitors who moved from the second to third step of the checkout. At the same time, you note a high number of page reloads at the second step. This information could mean, among other things, that there is a consistent problem with the form validation algorithm -- the system keeps on throwing visitors back to the previous step in the process. This is usually a very buggy part of the system. It takes good script writers to get this right within a reasonable time. But good scripts can of course be bought, ready-made. The testing and tweaking you wind up doing to improve your site, your marketing campaigns, and ultimately your ROI, will be just as individual as your business and the metrics you choose to apply to it.