Web Marketing Strategy

In order to profit on the web, one must have an audience – traffic. Traffic, which consists of the people that will buy your products, subscribe to your services, click on your ads and, in short, make you money, is derived from web marketing. A beautiful web site, which sells a perfect product, is of no use without traffic. Now that that’s clear, “How does one go about getting web traffic?” you may ask. As you may have guessed, there are a variety of web marketing strategies to get visitors to your site. Paying per click, newsletters, publishing articles, joining formums, trading links with other sites, and getting listed in search engines are all integral elements of most web marketing plans.

Let’s begin by examining pay-per-click search engines. The basic concept is that a site owner will bid on a per-click price for different keywords. For example, if your site sells widgets, you may wish to bid five cents per click on the keywords or phrases, “widgets, widgets for sale, widget suppliers.” A surfer would go to search engine x that you are advertising on and serach for “widgets”. Your widget site will come up in the results of the search, and if the visitor clicks on your link, you will be charged the five cents you bid on the keyword.

Pay-per-click search engines are useful for a variety of reasons. First off, if you have a new site, you may want to know if your sales pitch is effective. A very useful piece of data is the conversion ratio. A conversion ratio is the number of visitors to your site compared to the number of sales. Conversion ratios can range anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in… well, a really big number. So you have a brand spanking new site selling widgets and you’d like to see how well it convert visitors into sales. You would sign up for a pay-per-click program and get a sample of a few thousand hits. You would determine the conversion ration and make any necessary tweaks to the site. Using pay per click engines is a useful method for quickly testing the effectiveness of your site.

Pay per click search engines can also work very well if you know the average amount each visitor spends on your site. If a widget costs $10.00, and one in a thousand people that visit your site buys one, then your average per visitor expenditure is $.01. Obviously, if you can buy traffic for less than a cent per click, you’re in business. If you can’t, changes need to be made.

A few more things you should know about pay per click search engines, then we will move on to our next topic. The ranking of your site in the results listing, or how close it is to the top, is based on your per click bid. If you bid one cent for traffic and your site comes up on the twentieth page of search results, a) you will not get many click-throughs, and b) the people you do get clicking through have likely seen hundreds of other sites on the same search term before getting to yours. If the surfer didn’t spend money on one of those sites, what are the chances they will spend money on yours? None.

Another key plan to a web marketing strategy is a newsletter. A newsletter allows a site operator a chance to get a high numbers of visitors returning to their site – visitors that are likely to buy. A newsletter generally takes the form of text or a single web page that is emailed to a list of people that have opted into the mailing by entering their email address. A newsletter can contain such items as articles, coupons, event calendars, images or any other useful or entertaining item that will entice visitors to visit the site. Ads are often placed in newsletters as an additional source of revenue. Keep in mind that spam – which is illegal – is sending information and sales pitches to users who have not opted into the list. This really pisses people off and is illegal, so don’t do it.

Trading links is an essential marketing strategy for most web sites. Trading links with other sites produces high quality traffic if you are selective with the sites you choose to trade links with. Trading links gets your name out in front of people and builds consumer recognition. Trading links also allows you to network in your own and related field. Most importantly, it also increases search engine relevancy, which we will discuss next.

To trade links with other sites, a proven approach would be to select the sites you wish to trade links with and post a link to their site on your own. A high traffic spot of your site, rather than a links page tucked away in some corner, is always preferential to the linkee, but keep in mind that you don’t want to be squandering your traffic either. After you have placed all the links to sites you wish to trade links with, send them each an email showing that you have posted their link and kindly request a link on their site. After a week or so, you can edit your links to include only those that have linked back.

Perhaps the most important web marketing technique is getting top rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are several steps to getting good placement in search engines. First, your web pages must be created to be attractive to the search engines. Search engines use spiders to index your site. A spider will take into account a page’s title, domain, keywords and meta tags, text on the page, as well as other factors.

Also included in the algorithm which will determine a site’s ranking in a search engine is the number of links there are to that site from other sites. The more a site has links coming into it, the higher the site will rank. The higher the sites linked into one’s site are ranked, the higher the relevancy of the linked site will be.

Any good marketing plan begins with… well, a plan. With the information in this article you can begin to see the many intricacies of web marketing and begin to form a plan of your own. Setting goals and keeping timelines will help keep you on track. Stay tuned for more in depth articles on search engine placement and web marketing. Until next time, happy marketing!