Marketing an Online Business

Marketing an Online Business – Put your business in front of eyeballs looking for what you provide, it’s not hard if you follow a tried and tested process that works.

Marketing an online business centres around generating free targeted traffic looking for what you provide and getting those visitors to respond in the way you want them to. There is quite a lot more to it than just putting up a professional looking website that presents your products or services.

Marketing an Online Business – Know Your Customers Needs.

The first stage of this process is to do some solid market research – or – keyword research. Keywords are the phrases that web surfers type into search engines. You can’t afford to guess at this if you want high volumes of targeted traffic. You need to do this whether you intend to pay for traffic with PPC or generate free search engine traffic (preferred) or both (I recommend both).

Here you need a good keyword researching tool that gathers information from the major engines, calculates profitability for keyword phrases and tells you which ones are high demand and low supply. I use the Brainstorm It! Feature of SBI! along with a handy little free tool called Search It! You can learn how to use Search It! for free keyword research in the Affiliate Masters Course (free download) in chapters 2 and 3.

Marketing an Online Business - Different Keywords for Different Buying Stages

Researching profitable keywords is a start, but to really know your visitors you need to follow their purchasing habits. With the vast array of choice online consumers tend to shop around a fair bit before making a buying decision.

When brainstorming you’ll need to identify phrases that correspond to the stages of the buying cycle. These can be grouped into:

• ‘Browse keywords’ or ‘research keywords’ - which the consumers type in when looking for information about certain types of products.

• ‘Shop keywords’ or ‘compare keywords’ where consumers are comparing brands, prices, features and bonuses etc.

• ‘Buy keywords’ – when consumers have made their decision and are searching for information on shipping, store locations and the best price/deal for the specific product they are after.

You can read more about keywords and the buying cycle here, needless to say that marketing an online business is all about meeting the needs of your visitors at each of those stages.

So far we’ve learnt that market (keyword) research is not something to leave down to guesswork -and that to be successful you have to meet the needs of consumers at each stage of the buying cycle and get them to make their final decision to buy from you!

Marketing an Online Business – PREsell then Sell!

If an offline shopper is browsing and gathering information a good salesperson will help them become more informed on the products, advantages/disadvantages, suitability and comparisons with similar brands etc. without trying to force a hard sell that will just turn them off and have them head straight for the exit.

Even if the shopper is nowhere near ready to make a purchase a good salesperson will give their time, knowledge and expertise delivering impartial objective information and meeting the needs of the customer first.

The whole warming up process is critical to the sale, even if the customer does not buy there and then. If it’s done well the customer will hopefully walk back into the showroom when ready to buy with a decision to take their business with that salesperson – all that giving has paid off. No one likes pushy salespeople- your website is your salesperson.

When marketing an online business you can’t meet your browsing/shopping visitors face to face and warm them up to buy from you, that has to be done with content – content that PREsells.

Getting PREselling right can result in conversion rates (ratio of site visitors that convert into customers) exploding into very high figures. Combine that with high volumes of targeted traffic and..well – you get the idea.

Writing to PREsell effectively is something covered in the book Make Your Content PREsell (free download), it’s a book I’ve read about 4 times now and still constantly refer to when working on improving my conversion rates.

Successfully marketing an online business relies on content for 3 reasons, firstly more content = more free search engine traffic, secondly good content that PREsells converts much higher that pure hard sell. The third reason is that quality sites have little trouble getting similarly themed quality sites and directories to link to them and more links = higher search engine placement. It’s all good when you have great content.

**Want more quality relevant links? – Join Value Exchange for FREE and get in touch with quality site owners who will exchange links to generate more traffic to your business!**

Marketing an Online Business – Be your own affiliate – and recruit others!

Affiliate marketing is one of the hottest phenomena’s on the web. Anyone with any sense is using affiliates to drive traffic to their business on top of their own traffic building efforts.

An affiliate’s job is to direct targeted traffic to their merchant partner’s business. Good affiliates direct targeted PREsold traffic. By creating quality content that PREsells your visitors you are effectively being your own affiliate.

Recruiting good affiliates is also a very wise move when marketing an online business, to create a high quality, motivating and functional affiliate program you should understand how affiliate marketing works. A great place to start can be found in chapter 4 of the Affiliate Masters Course (free download) where it tells you what qualities to look for in an affiliate program and what ‘red flags’ to avoid.

This is written for affiliates building their own businesses but the information here is incredibly useful for those thinking of starting an affiliate program for marketing an online business.

Marketing an Online Business – Other traffic sources and Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is all the rage now and growing in momentum. Many businesses have recognised the importance of blogging as a source of traffic and have adapted what was originally a medium for personal expression and developed ‘business blogging’.

Web 2.0 takes customer interaction and market research to a new level, never before has it been so easy to get your customers to actually tell you what they want. Forums, blogs, surveys, competitions social bookmarking and the many other Web 2.0 mediums make it a snap to gain invaluable feedback on your business and how to cater for your customers needs.

Marketing an Online Business – The Money is in the List!

If you’ve been around online marketing for any amount of time you will no doubt been told that the fortune is in subscriber lists. People who have signed up for your newsletter are potential repeat customers who want to hear from you.

A businesses’ greatest asset is not its products, not its physical assets, not even its employees – it is the customer database, in the case of online business the subscriber list.

With a large list of subscribers you can contact them over and over with notifications of additions to your website, new products, promotions, recommendations of other people’s products you are affiliated with and more.

Now you know about the buying cycle you will understand that very few people buy on their first visit. Typically it will take 5-7 contacts with them before they make a purchase depending on the price range of the type of products (some can take up to a year).

Of course if you bombard them with offer after offer and try and ‘force the sale’ in any way you can expect them to unsubscribe in droves, so you need to keep the balance of give then take in check.

Marketing an Online Business – Give then Take

Going back to giving then taking and the whole idea of PREselling – getting people to join your list isn’t hard as long as they know they will get some real value from it. Offer them something for free in exchange for their contact details. Invest some of your time and effort into creating some ‘freebies’ (ebooks, software, downloadable video/audio) which deliver real value for nothing.

Overdelivering and meeting your customers needs first pays back in spades, as already stated you don’t have the chance to meet them face to face - good content is the closest you can get to that.

Marketing an Online Business – Conclusion

Doing business online requires going the extra mile for your customer. Your only opportunity to convince them that you care more about them than your competitor does is to give them more than they bargained for up front.

I’ve learnt about marketing an online business through using a process known as C-T-P-M (content-traffic-presell-monetize). It helped me get everything in the right order and build my business for long term success.

Click here for more info in C-T-P-M, how it works and why it works so well. If you like you can watch a short video about it here – this is the Site Build It! action guide that SBI owners get, but you can see it just to get an idea of the process, watch day 1 (click the top left link for the day 1 video).

The key to successfully marketing an online business is to understand the importance of quality PREselling content that is based around well researched high demand/low supply keywords. For my online business I chose to invest in Site Build It! because of the ease of use, newbie friendliness, removal of 90% of the learning curve and 100% money back guarantee.

So far my business (this website) is doing OK, it’s still fairly new but the free traffic snowball is growing as predicted. To see if SBI! would work for you, why not see if you can find the business model that best fits your needs. If in doubt you could always ask a question. All I can really tell you about SBI! is that it works for me – marketing an online business has never been more fun, satisfying and easy!