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What Works in Online Marketing?
Tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
This
entails asking your customers where they first heard of your site - whether
it is through a search engine, a review or mention of your site or product
in another site, an article you submitted for publication, your banner
advertising, or a classified ad. If you are launching an advertising
campaign, you need to put tracking codes to know which kind of ad (e.g.
banner, advertising, sponsorships, newsletter ads) are working, and from
which media buy are you getting the most click-throughs. Carefully evaluate
each and every media buy, and refocus your marketing program to advertising
strategies that really work for your business.
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Constantly marketing your business. To succeed on the
Internet, it is imperative to take the time to do one little thing to market
your business each and every day. If possible, you should spend at least two
hours of your day marketing your business, whether it is submitting your
pages to the search engine, posting responses on bulletin boards (with your
ever-present signature file) and newsgroups, sending articles for possible
publication in e-zines, or networking with other online entrepreneurs.
Understanding the difference between marketing and selling.
Marketing is letting potential customers know about your business and
getting them to visit your site. In Internet-speak, it is called
"getting the eyeballs." However, selling is an entirely different
thing. It hinges on the quality of your product offerings, the pull of your
Web site's copy, the simplicity of your checkout process, and the overall
look and feel of your site. You should not stop in merely getting eyeballs;
but rather, constantly evaluate whether your site has the power to draw the
sale out of your visitors.
What Doesn't Work?
Complacency and naïve assumptions. Most online
entrepreneurs fall into the trap of believing that once they build their
site, people will automatically come. No, no and no! That is the biggest
fallacy on the Internet. You should never make the mistake of waiting for
word-of-mouth to take effect. Your main task is to create the word of mouth,
which you can achieve only through relentless marketing effort.
Sub-standard Web site quality. You may have spent a bundle
buying banner advertising space, newsletter classifieds, or keyword
searches. But when your potential customers actually visit your site, they
are met with slow loading pages, sloppy copy, grammatical errors, amateurish
layout, and long-winded and complicated purchasing process. If these are
what your visitors will see, expect to have a high rate of abandoned
shopping carts instead of completed sales. Remember, all it takes is eight
seconds for your visitor to click away from your site.
Sending unsolicited e-mail. Many new online marketers make
the mistake of sending unsolicited e-mail, or spam, to get the word out
about their business. They are lured by the false promises of mailing list
vendors that that e-mail lists they are buying are "opt-ins" or
have agreed to receive e-mails from marketers like them. Instead, they learn
the hard way that spam messages are ineffective marketing vehicles:
recipients merely delete the messages, or worse, even complain to the
marketer's ISP and Web hosts to terminate the account. Instead of their
traffic going through the roof, your inbox can be flooded with flames, hate
mails and requests for remove. Receiving even one flame message can be
disheartening, much more so requests for termination of your accounts.
Others, what I call the "true-blue spammers" send out marketing
messages whose credibility are severely compromised by the fact that they
present wrong e-mail addresses and disguises their IP addresses. Such a
waste of time and resources!
About the Author:
Nach M Maravilla is the publisher
of Power Homebiz Guides.
March 2001
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