What is an Effective Internet Marketing Strategy?

If you’re still struggling to finally reach your financial independence & make a nice living from your home, then listen... The only reason why you’re failing is because you don’t have a good website marketing strategy.

If you ask any successful offline world entrepreneur how it’s possible to build a great business without a proper strategy, he’ll start laughing. But many internet marketers are trying to make money without even realizing what on earth they’re doing online…

If you believe that you can jump in, create a website, submit it to a few directories or blogs, sit down, relax & watch those thousands of dollars (that you’ve seen in many marketers’ checks) to come, then you need to stop right there. It ain’t gonna happen. You need to think: who you are and where do you want to be in the future. Whether offline or online, there are only two things that matter: “Buying” and “Selling”. Basically, to simplify, it all comes down to this:

• Who is your customer?
  What is he or she specifically looking for? You must know their problems or desires. You must be in their shoes and find out what is that would make them feel better (an offer).
  
  
• What is your offer?
  Why should they buy from you? How come you’re better than the rest? Why should they trust you? Are you offering your own or someone else’s product? How will you create an irresistible offer so they beg you to sell it to them?
  

Think about it… There are millions of people buying online every single day. If they’re not buying from you then whose fault is that - theirs or yours?

Before you even start creating internet marketing strategy for your website(s), you need to do a research. That’s where it all begins actually. Just like in any business, you have to understand where you are and what can you do.

#1 Phase - Online Research

In this phase, you must research your market. Who are your main competitors? What are they doing online? PPC, SEO, press releases, develop their own products, do affiliate marketing or Adsense? What are their weaknesses? Do they offer a guarantee? Is their product really good? Do they build links constantly or not?

Who is your favourite customer? Where do they hangout: MySpace or YouTube? Are they freebie seekers or desperate buyers? What forces them to buy one or another product? Read reviews, forums, testimonials to find out as much as you can about your target market.

#2 Phase – Data Analysis

If you’ve performed a thorough online market research, it’s time to systematize the data you have. Write down what are the main strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Maybe you have more time than your competitors? Or maybe you know some targeted traffic source that others don’t. How might this affect your business?

Which are the places your target market usually visits? What are their main concerns? Maybe they’re not satisfied with the products in the market. Can offer something better, maybe in a form of a bonus? After that, you come to the next step, which is developing your internet marketing strategy.

#3 Phase – Strategy Development

When you already know your target market and your competitors, you are able to start creating your internet marketing strategy (or strategies). Just sit down and think about: who you are and what you can offer to the target market.

It involves a little bit of planning. What marketing methods you’ll use and which ones you can afford? PPC, SEO, email, blogging, podcasting, video blogging, webinars, viral traffic generation, link building, banner exchange or others…? You must prioritize your web marketing tactics. Find out what’s going to bring you positive ROI in the shortest time possible.

Do you have enough time to perform search engine optimization? If so, then sit and do everything you can, day in day out, to rank at the top in search engines. Don’t have time? Then buy PPC traffic and start testing your landing pages effectively. Or buy resell rights to products and sell them on ClickBank with the help of JV partners.

Don’t have time AND money? Then you better get one or another, otherwise you’re dead.

Seriously, you must find ways to get time or money. You need to think about how you can exploit other people’s time and money to build your own web business. That’s what rich people do and that’s what you must do if you want to survive in this competitive world.

#4 Phase – Monitoring Performance

When you have an internet marketing plan, you can start implementing it right away. The last step is to start monitoring your internet marketing campaigns. Which keywords people typed into search engines to find your site? Which keywords brought you the most money in PPC marketing? Are you satisfied with your SEO rankings or not? Do majority of your visitors leave your site without even spending 30 seconds? And so on…

Only with the help of close monitoring you can discover what works and what doesn’t. Testing landing pages, testing Adwords ads against each other (A/B split testing) can show you some amazing results. And remember – you never know for sure until you TEST it!

There is no formula for an effective Internet marketing strategy. It depends on your individual situation. When you realize your strengths and weaknesses, you'll be able to come up with a great marketing plan. No matter if you're thinking about Adsense site, affiliate site or your own product. When you find out what you're able to accomplish with your resources at the moment, you can create a great web marketing strategy for your online business and finally breakthrough on the internet.

source:http://www.optimizationindia.com/news/7.php

Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies

Internet marketing can attract more people to your website, increase customers for your business, and enhance branding of your company and products. If you are just beginning your online marketing strategy the top 10 list below will get you started on a plan that has worked for many.

1. Start with a web promotion plan and an effective web design and development strategy.
2. Get ranked at the top in major search engines, and practice good Search Optimization Techniques.
3. Learn to use Email Marketing Effectively.
4. Dominate your marketing niche with affiliate, reseller, and associate programs.
5. Request an analysis from an Internet marketing coach or Internet marketing consultant.
6. Build a responsive opt-in email list.
7. Publish articles or get listed in news stories.
8. Write and publish online press releases.
9. Facilitate and run contests and giveaways via your web site.
10. Blog and interact with your visitors.

By following the above tips you'll be on your way to creating a concrete internet marketing strategy that could boost your business substantially.

source: http://marketing.about.com/od/internetmarketingstrategy/a/internettips.htm

How To Deal Effectively with Customer Feedback via Social Media

Great interview on eMarketer with Pete Blackshaw, vice president of Digital Strategic Services at Nielsen, and his colleague, Maya Swedowsky on how to deal effectively with customer feedback via social media.
I thought the interview was very interesting, especially around how to deal with negative feedback. Excerpts from the interview is below:

eMarketer: What causes negative buzz to escalate into something big?
Mr. Blackshaw: It depends on what you might characterize as “plausible believability” or the extent to which others feel like they have direct or relevant experience, even something that approximates it. So a lot of what you see is, in fact, consumers seconding the emotion. They can relate to that issue. In some cases, it may move in a really irrational, sometimes unfair, direction. But quite often, especially in retail, there are quite a few consumers who truly have relevant experience. So if they feel like they can relate to the emotional pain, they’ll pile on. Now, if the criticism is unfair, it’s not uncommon for other consumers to call that out. There is a bit of a self-correcting mechanism when the issue goes too far.
When you do have a consensus of negatives, that’s a big watch-out. We typically will take that data and go back to the clients and often ask really hard questions about company operations, mismanaged expectations, depth of training of employees, because sometimes that can trigger a lot of the negatives. We do look at this with the assumption that there typically is an issue that needs to be resolved.

eMarketer: Do consumers post negative comments online other than to get a direct response from a retailer?
Mr. Blackshaw: A lot of times they’re not looking for a response. Again, that’s what’s so important, even curious, about the social media space. We sometimes have this stereotype that consumers are just looking for coupons or free stuff or handholding by the company. There’s definitely a lot of truth to that. Today, consumers get a lot of validation and satisfaction and a sense of community with other consumers around a common experience. Marketers really need to understand that. It’s one big reason why the CRM space has pushed into this more informal zone of feedback where consumers aren’t necessarily providing direct feedback, but they’re talking around the company. It still merits interventions of sorts, but it’s a completely different dynamic. It’s really important to understand what is truly motivating that consumer.

eMarketer: What factors should retailers consider in deciding how to respond to a negative comment online?
Ms. Swedowsky: If that person has come to one of the company’s social media outposts, like Facebook or Twitter, to make that comment, that the retailer should respond to that and should try to respond to really most comments that are posted directly on the Facebook fan page or directed at their Twitter account, because it’s clear that that person is making their statement or their stance known and presumably wants a response. But there are conversations happening everywhere.
So companies like Best Buy are really at the forefront of proactively monitoring with their Twelpforce customer service program. They really are one of the first retailers to be so proactive. At the same time, even if they have 1,200 people, let’s say, doing that, they can’t necessarily answer everyone. So they need to prioritize. If it is someone who had a very specific negative experience at a store and they’re complaining about that, then that person might be more straightforward to address versus someone who’s just airing general negativity. At some point you need to prioritize simply because there is so much discussion happening.
Mr. Blackshaw: It’s all how you provide context, how you measure the influence. If it’s an issue where you historically have shown volatility, you may want to dial up. Sometimes there’s a real cost of not engaging and responding. Sometimes the response is just how you make sure that your Website has content that might thoughtfully deal with their issue.

eMarketer: How are retailers using YouTube to respond to consumer complaints?
Mr. Blackshaw: Brands are leveraging every available communications outlet to clarify and correct issues, whether it’s an auto manufacturer seeking to deal with a recall or whether it’s a retailer dealing with all sorts of nasty-grams because they got things wrong on Black Friday. What’s powerful about rapid response tools like YouTube is they can often speak to emotion. You’re looking at the executive. They’re giving a very heartfelt apology or clarifying an issue. Facebook is a 24/7 platform. Twitter is always on. So they afford you these additional outlets to deal with the issue.
Keep in mind that most companies have call centers that are living in the Neanderthal age where they close at 5:00 p.m. They typically don’t operate in the off hours. That’s not good enough in a world where the consumer doesn’t care. They will throw the nasty-gram at any time of the day. So making sure that you hedge your bet and have these opportunities to engage and respond across all these different platforms 24/7 is a really good strategy.

source: social-media-optimization

Introduction to Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a new term that was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava and has since been taking on life of its own. In his introduction to SMO, Rohit draws similar comparisons to SEO. SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren't the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it's not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.

First of all "social media" is a buzzword that has been thrown around a lot lately. But what exactly does it really mean? Wikipedia describes social media as...

the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.

Also, social media can be considered anything that can help build a community to rally around. Companies/websites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, and Revver all fit the bill. These are all websites that can now be used as places to put out your marketing message. Spreading messages through blog posts and blog search engines also fits the bill. It is all about making something easy to spread, which, by the way, used to be called word-of-mouth. Buyer beware though, you can't force SMO. This is pull marketing; it is not "push your message onto someone marketing".

With SEO the goals are clearly defined, you're trying to make a website visible in the search engines. Is SMO really as simple to define as making your site visible in the social media? Does that entail anyway possible and include buying banner ads on MySpace?

Rohit defines the goals as...

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

... and then he lays out 5 rules for SMO...

Increase Your Linkability
Make Tagging and Bookmarking easy
Reward Inbound Links
Help Your Content Travel
Encourage the Mashup
...Jeremiah Owyang gives us a couple more rules...

Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn't Help You
Reward Helpful and Valuable Users
In way it sounds a whole lot like Marketing 2.0. It is pretty much includes all the new marketing techniques that are becoming popular rolled into one, techniques such as; Linkbaiting, Usability Design, Buzz Marketing, Community Building, and anything that can be considered "pull marketing".

Here's a few more possible rules...

8. Participate - Join the conversation. Social Media is a two way street, lets not forget that. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. You are keeping it going and this often results in a snowball effect. Participating helps your message spread further and faster.

9. Know how to target your audience - If you don't even know your target audience you are in trouble. I would love to have everyone using my product too, but you need to be realistic. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can't. So know your appeal and who it is appealing to.

10. Create content - There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will work. Whether it is creating widgets, making people laugh, or writing a whitepaper, it can be done. Know what type of content can work for you and create it.

11. Be real - The community does not reward fakers.

While social media optimization is becoming very important you can't forget about good old SEO either. Google and Yahoo still drive mass amounts of traffic and you ca not ignore them. It is all about leveraging new mediums and riding these waves. Even though you might be getting dirt on the white glove you still have to take advantage of these powerful channels.

I'm hoping these articles will encourage discussion and new rules that develop from others. As Rohit says...

There are many other "rules" and techniques that we are starting to uncover as this idea gets more sophisticated. In the meantime we are always on the lookout for new ideas in Social Media Optimization to encourage even better thinking.

source: pronetadvertising