The first step is to know who your customers are. If your
customers are over 30, professionals with a great deal of excess money
each month, marketing online to college kids with a limited income
doesn't make much sense and wastes your time. Once you know who your
audience is you need to bring them to you. There are multiple ways to do
this. Opinions vary on email marketing but it is still an effective way
to get people interested in what you are selling.
Advertise through social media! Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are helpful in creating brand awareness and bringing your target audience to you. Though it's easy to want to create an account on every social network application, resist the temptation! The point is to target your audience! Determine where on social networking your people are and go there.
The biggest challenge with online marketing is search engines. If people can't find you, you won't sell. Most people will not go beyond the first page of results when initiating a search. This is where SEO comes in. It sounds harder than it is! Bing and Google transformed SEO making it a consumer experience search engine. The power of the people buying your product is what puts you high on the search results page. SEO is based on keywords. Words, short phrases, and sentences are what allow your product to connect with a consumers search. Original content in your product descriptions are key to success in online marketing. Having the same wording as everyone else will rank you lower than you want to be. Make sure you are placing those all-important keywords in original text. Try to make those product descriptions lengthy and detailed!
There are technical aspects to online marketing as well! Make sure your links work are the all-important rule. Broken links, links that go offsite etc. will be the first way to lose potential customers. Set up a sitemap! Setting a sitemap will help the potential customers find the pages that may be hard to find otherwise such as not being well linked or having pictures. Always evaluate your links and quickly diagnose and fix any broken links immediately. Check each week and see what keywords are driving customers to your site. Pick the top three and make sure you are liberally using those keywords. Check your loading speeds at least once a week. Nothing will drive away a potential customer like waiting a long time for pages to load.
And finally, make sure you set up an active Google+ profile to show authorship for search engines. All of these tips will help you with your online marketing journey but at the base; always make sure your product is the best it can be from the start.
Advertise through social media! Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are helpful in creating brand awareness and bringing your target audience to you. Though it's easy to want to create an account on every social network application, resist the temptation! The point is to target your audience! Determine where on social networking your people are and go there.
The biggest challenge with online marketing is search engines. If people can't find you, you won't sell. Most people will not go beyond the first page of results when initiating a search. This is where SEO comes in. It sounds harder than it is! Bing and Google transformed SEO making it a consumer experience search engine. The power of the people buying your product is what puts you high on the search results page. SEO is based on keywords. Words, short phrases, and sentences are what allow your product to connect with a consumers search. Original content in your product descriptions are key to success in online marketing. Having the same wording as everyone else will rank you lower than you want to be. Make sure you are placing those all-important keywords in original text. Try to make those product descriptions lengthy and detailed!
There are technical aspects to online marketing as well! Make sure your links work are the all-important rule. Broken links, links that go offsite etc. will be the first way to lose potential customers. Set up a sitemap! Setting a sitemap will help the potential customers find the pages that may be hard to find otherwise such as not being well linked or having pictures. Always evaluate your links and quickly diagnose and fix any broken links immediately. Check each week and see what keywords are driving customers to your site. Pick the top three and make sure you are liberally using those keywords. Check your loading speeds at least once a week. Nothing will drive away a potential customer like waiting a long time for pages to load.
And finally, make sure you set up an active Google+ profile to show authorship for search engines. All of these tips will help you with your online marketing journey but at the base; always make sure your product is the best it can be from the start.