THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF ONLINE MARKETING

I. Define your target market: international, national, country specific, state specific, local or a combination thereof.
-Percentages of the market in each category

II. Decide on the purpose of your website.
-Provide information
-Sell products and/or services
-Company or product branding
-Generate leads
-Other

III. Establish a monthly or yearly budget for online marketing.

IV. Develop a twelve month online marketing plan.
-Adjust your marketing plan approximately every month based on web traffic and your conversion rate.

V. Designate a point person in house to be responsible for plan follow-up and monitoring progress.

VI. Establish a relationship with a reliable, experienced outside resource (web design, SEO or marketing firm) to partner with to help and assist in implementing your online marketing plan.

VII. Properly optimize a new website or restructure an existing website for optimization and integrate or add all the appropriate online marketing features and functions necessary to go along with your online marketing plan.
- It’s important to create an online sales and marketing tool versus just a website.
- Consider the sales and marketing elements first, then design the website around them.
- On your Home Page you must describe exactly what you do and what separates you from your competition.
- "Why should anyone do business with you?"

VIII. Make sure you have a comprehensive web statistics program in place to track your web traffic.
- Create a Ground Zero Report to use as a base reference for your online marketing efforts.
- Check your web rankings regularly (Alexa ranking, Google page rank, link popularity, search engine rankings).

IX. Make sure you have a plan to track your conversion rate (sales, leads, requests, etc.) based on the amount of web traffic you are getting.

X. Check your statistics and track your conversions on a regular basis to analyze how your website is doing.

*NOTES:
1 - The online marketing process is an ongoing and dynamic effort. There is no "magic bullet!" It’s like "paddling a canoe upstream, if you stop you go downstream real fast!"
2 – Make sure your online marketing efforts are properly coordinated with your offline marketing efforts.

Google Remains the “900” Pound Gorilla of Search

RESTON, Va., July 16, 2007 – comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In June 2007, Google Sites maintained its spot atop the rankings with 49.5 percent of the U.S. search market. Yahoo! Sites captured second place with 25.1 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (13.2 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.2 percent).

Check out the June U.S. Search Engine Rankings from comScore:



*Americans conducted 8.0 billion searches online in June, up 6 percent versus May and up 26 percent versus June 2006.

*Google Sites led the pack with 4.0 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), Ask Network (403 million), and Time Warner Network (341 million). Despite declining in search market share in June, both Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites enjoyed increases in search query volume.

*Microsoft Sites experienced a significant increase in search query volume (up 36 percent) and search market share (up 2.9 share points) in June, due in large part to Live Search Club, a program launched by Microsoft in late May to engage and reward users of Live Search.


If you want to find out how to get favorably ranked on Google go to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you need help, don’t hesitate to call me at 888-932-2333 #222.

WHAT IS BETTER – SEO OR PPC?

Most commercial websites work best if both SEO and PPC are used. The exact percentages depend on your goals.

Pay per click advertising (PPC):

Advantages:

-You get instant results, you will start getting traffic immediately and not months later.

-PPC ads are perfect for time limited offers such as holiday sales and promotional events.

-You can stop your ads at any time.

-PPC ads make it easy to test a variety of keywords and landing pages.

-PPC ads also work with websites that are not favorable for good search engine rankings, such as frame structures, FLASH sites and dynamic pages.

-PPC ads allow you to bid on a many different keywords and keyword phrases, including misspellings and other variations that you cannot display on your web pages.

-PPC allows you to control your marketing budget.

-You decide where your keywords and keyword phrases are to be displayed on the search engines.

Disadvantages:

-PPC advertising can become very expensive if you bid on the wrong keywords or if you don't calculate the maximum bid price correctly.

-Click fraud can be a problem. Not all visitors are potential customers.

-You will get increased traffic but may not get sufficient conversions to sales or leads because the traffic is not targeted specific enough.

-Your sales may not be enough to offset the cost of the ads.

-More search engine visitors tend to favor and thus click-thru the organic listings.

Search engine optimization (SEO):

Advantages:

-Traffic through organic search engine listings has minimal reoccurring cost once the initial expense and up-front work has been completed.

-After the site has been optimized and you have achieved favorable listings, you can then use your online marketing budget for other programs.

-A large volume of visitors and click-thrus to your site won’t cost you money.

-Search engine optimization offers long term results that don't require constant financial spending.

-Link building, which is part of search engine optimization, will also get targeted traffic from other websites to yours.

-Optimizing your site properly will also make it more user friendly.

-More search engine visitors tend to favor and thus click-thru the organic listings.

Disadvantages:

-SEO is very time-consuming both up-front and ongoing.

-SEO may require that you redesign your site and/or reprogram your code to make your website search engine friendly.

-You must constantly update and refresh your content to keep your search engine listings high.

-You must constantly continue to build links to your site to maintain or increase your link popularity.

-It will cost considerably more money to optimize your site properly when being developed than it would otherwise.

-It will cost additional dollars to restructure and reprogram your site if you decide to properly optimize an existing site.

-You have no choice as to where your keywords and keyword phrases are to be displayed on the search engines.

Search engine optimization delivers lasting results and it costs considerably less in the long term. However, you must make sure that you optimize a website correctly to get high search engine rankings.

Pay per click advertising and search engine optimization both contribute to the success of your website. If you use a combination of both, you can get many new visitors and customers without spending a fortune. The key is to track your conversions to make sure you are getting a favorable Return On Investment (ROI). You must generate more revenue than you are spending on SEO and PPC to make it worthwhile.

Fundamentals of Online Marketing

The following outline will help you establish your basic needs before you start an online marketing program:

I – Twelve month online marketing plan based on:

- What is the objective of your website?
- Who is your target market?
- How much in-house time do you have to devote to online marketing?
- What is your budget?

II – Key Performance Indicators (KPI):
- What stats need to be monitored?
- What web traffic indicators are to be used?
- What conversion rates are to be evaluated?
- Ground Zero Report with all the KPI’s established (tracking and stats data for existing sites).

III – Tracking software and tools:
- What will be used to track and analyze information for the KPI’s?

IV – Competitive analysis:
- Find out what other websites in your business category are doing.

V – Online marketing work responsibility:
- Establish a point person in the organization responsible for the website marketing.
- Assign in-house work.
- Assign outsource work.

VI – Evaluate information and data:
- How often and who is going to analyze data (KPI’s) and make recommendations and adjustments to twelve month marketing plan?

It is highly recommended that you meet with professionals to put together a proper marketing plan and establish how you are going to track and evaluate your website success.