Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - Scorpion Agency - Internet Marketing

Sometimes your head can be so buzzed with all these Internet marketing details that you feel overwhelmed. You don’t know where to start. You can’t see the forest for the trees. While there is a lot of depth to be understood, I think that Internet promotion can be distilled down to eight essential types. Wrap your mind around these basic concepts and you can grasp what Internet promotion is all about. Here are the eight:

  

   1. Search engines
   2. Linking strategies
   3. Viral strategies
   4. Public relations   
   5. Traditional media
   6. E-mail publishing
   7. Networking
   8. Paid advertising

1. Search engines

Many people, perhaps even a majority of people, will use search engines and the Yahoo! directory to find what they’re looking for on the Web. So the place to start in promotion is to design webpages that will be indexed well by the search engines, using descriptive titles and accurate META tags. When you’re ready, submit your site so that search engines will index (“spider”) it, using a submission tool such as the Scorpion Agency Submission Service Getting a listing in the Yahoo! & Google Directories are the most important tasks -- and the most difficult. Search engines are important. Be persistent. If your site doesn’t show up within a few weeks, submit again ... and again ... and again.

But with hundreds of millions of webpages, and only 15% to 20% of them indexed, it’s very easy for your site to get lost. The remedy (which adds to the clutter) is to create a set of doorway or gateway webpages, each tuned to score high on a specific search engine for a specific search word or phrase. (Note: While door way pages aid in a faster recognition of search engine listing, I DO NOT recommend them, I repeat, I Do NOT recommend them! The reason why is due to the fact that they worked great in the past, times have changed & google for 1 is adapting to doorway & portal pages, starting to penalize for them.)

2. Linking strategies

Linking strategies are a second essential type of site promotion. The more links pointing to your site, the more traffic you’ll experience (and the greater perceived “popularity” will rank you higher in the search engines). To get someone to link to your site you need to ask. The simplest way is to find complementary sites, link to them on a linking page, and ask them to link to you. The key, of course, is for your site to have content that is so good that it’s worth linking to. No one wants to link to a nothing website. (Note: Try & stick with sites that are PR3 --Popularity Ranking 3-- or Better)

Ask for links on sites that cover your industry, as well as from associations your business belongs to. Other approaches are to offer the best (and most trafficked) websites an “award” that consists of an award logo with a link pointing back to your site. Another popular method is to join a banner exchange. For every two banners displayed on your site promoting other businesses, one of your banners will be shown on another member site. Another important form of linking promotion involves paying affiliates for sales resulting from links to your site (PPC - Pay Per Click), but we’ll cover that under paid advertising. The Scorpion Agency Submission Service will auto submit your site to a minimum of 1,500+ Search Engines & Directories.

3. Viral strategies

An increasingly important process is to design a strategy that encourages others to carry your marketing message via e-mail, using their own network of relationships -- and preferably their own resources. This is called “viral marketing” after the way viruses multiply rapidly in a cell, commandeering the cell’s resources to do the virus’s bidding. The classic example is HotMail.com, a free e-mail system. Each e-mail message (sent by definition to a person’s own friends and associates) carries a message encouraging the recipient to sign up for a HotMail account, too. Another example is postcard or greeting cards, each of which carries a message encouraging the recipient to send a card to a friend -- carrying the siteowner’s marketing message. If you can write quality articles, you can offer them to others to use on their websites or in their newsletters, each article carrying a link to your website. Public relations to get press coverage is a kind of viral strategy, if you think about it.

4. Public relations

Public relations, the task of getting press coverage, is still a vital type of site promotion. If you can get a news release picked up by several print and/or Internet publications you’ll get a tremendous boost in traffic, all for “free,” letting the news periodical’s network carry your marketing message. Of course, nothing’s really free. You’ll need to have a truly newsworthy event, contest, free service, chat room -- or something -- or no decent publication will consider it news. Coming up with “free” services and events isn’t inexpensive, but the ensuing publicity can be excellent -- you may get an unbiased editorial recommendations that you couldn’t purchase for any amount of money. While there are free news release services, expect to pay several hundred dollars to have your news release sent to hundreds of subscribing periodicals.

5. Traditional media

Don’t discount traditional media in promoting your website -- news releases, of course, as well as paid advertising. A very effective way to promote your site is to place a small display ad in a targeted trade publication, offering some teaser copy and pointing readers to your URL or an autoresponder e-mail address for more information. This way your site serves as an online brochure, providing full information to interested shoppers day and night. A no-brainer is to make sure that all your company’s literature, cards, letterheads, and envelopes carry your website URL.

6. E-mail Publishing

If you’re smart you won’t even think of developing a business website without marrying it to an e-mail publication. The website is the shy partner who passively waits for people to come to him. But the e-mail publication is the bold, active partner who goes out to where people are and invites them to come meet her groom. Together they make a great couple.

7. Networking

An extremely important way to promote your website is through networking. Small business members of a local Chamber of Commerce know how making friends, being introduced, meeting new people at mixers, and being featured in the Chamber newsletter can help build your business. Networking isn’t quick, but it’s the basis of relationships that will grow your business through word-of-mouth over the years.

8. Paid advertising

You’ll notice that most of the first seven types of Internet Marketing can be done in-house relatively inexpensively (with the possible exception of search engine positioning). Of course, you may be able to find a marketing firm to which you can outsource some of these functions, but you can probably do a fine job yourself -- after all, it’s your business, and you are the one who can promote it most effectively.

But there comes a point that to get wider exposure, to break into the consciousness of the thousands of people who never haunt your end of the Web, you may need to resort to paid advertising. You’ll be paying high traffic sites or Internet publications to include a graphic or link that will channel large numbers of people to your site. There are several popular forms of paid advertising, with new approaches cropping up all the time:

    * Banner ads have been around the longest. Typically these are 468x60 pixel animated and linked graphic ads that appear at the top of a commercial webpage. (Scorpion Agency website Ads - Banner Design)
    * Paid Listings in Portal Sites. To get noticed, your online pet store may need to pay for a listing under the “Pets” category at Lycos Shop. For this you may pay a flat fee or a percentage of the sale. Consider it the equivalent of paying rent to enjoy the foot traffic that a suburban mall might attract.                          
    * Sponsorships are longer term paid ads on websites or e-mail newsletters.                                                       
    * (PPC) Pay-per-Click Links can be purchased on search engines such as Google & Yahoo, The price per click for the top spots depends upon what your competitors are willing to bid.        (More info. on the PPC Marketing page)                  
    * Pay-per-Sale Advertising is popularly known as an Affiliate or Associate Program. The merchant signs up a number of affiliates who place a link or linked graphic on their site. If a sale is made to a customer coming through that link, the affiliate earns a commission, typically 5% to 15% of the transaction total. This can be an effective -- and safe -- way to advertise, since you only have to pay when a sale is made. You can purchase software to run your own program, but I recommend outsourcing this to a service bureau such as Commission Junction, that charges an initial set-up fee and then 20% of the commission you pay your affiliates. (More Info. on the PPC Marketing)                                                                 
    * Paid ads in targeted e-mail newsletters can be very effective. There are hundreds of thousands of e-mail newsletters, many of which have very modest advertising fees.                                 
    * Opt-in E-mail Advertising involves sending a stand-alone ad for your business to individuals who have (hopefully) volunteered to receive information from your kind of business. These are called “opt-in” lists, since the list members have agreed to receive information. Avoid “opt-out” lists where recipients are placed on a list involuntarily and then invited to unsubscribe if they want to. Opt-in lists can be quite targeted, with ads getting a 1% to 3% click-through rate. Expect to pay about 15 cents to 30 cents per name; the list broker will do the e-mailing on your behalf.