Internet and Businesses Success

By Dianne Humphries

When you first start out on your Internet Marketing journey you are full of hope, full of enthusiasm and can hardly wait to get started. You build a website and they will come… maybe!

Most people start out blindly in Internet Marketing jumping from one shiny object to the next. If you don’t take the time to follow the 8 strategies I have listed below, you will still be spinning your wheels for years to come down the road.

1. Build your email list from the start. I cannot stress this one enough. If you don’t have a list, you don’t have customers. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have anyone to share all of your great knowledge with and who in turn will want to share with their readers. The gold is in the list.

2. Have a scheduled plan for any product launches. I have gone through many phases of “researching” a market for too long without creating anything significant. A plan helps to keep you focused. When you get to this phase of your business, you will want to develop some great products for your customers. Take the time to accomplish this step in an orderly manner. Your product will be in much more demand if it is done professionally instead of thrown together.

3. Learn to take the fear out of:

• People hating me
• People not liking my content
• People unsubscribing from my list

No matter what you do, how you behave, what you give, you WILL have people that will disagree with you. But, you can’t let that be a roadblock to your success. Don’t be scared of them, use them as a motivational factor to build a better you, a better product, a better company and a better industry.

4. Create a REAL physical brand.

Register your business, have an office, get a landline, build rapport and network. Branding is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. This is not something that you have to do right away, but start thinking about how you want people to know who you are. It will come to you as you start working your business.

5. Stick to one or two methods.

Before you take off and learn 15 methods on “How To __________” (you fill in the blank), learn one or two methods fully before you race off to the next method. This is not a race! If you don’t take the time to learn things fully, you know a bunch of nothing and it will show.

6. Learn copywriting. You don’t have to be an excellent writer, but it helps to know how to pull together an outline, do research on a given subject and keyword research. If you want to write decent copy, learn a little bit about copywriting. You will need these skills to write posts such as this one on your website or blog.

7. Stop trying to be the “guru” on every Internet Marketing subject out there. As you make your way through this Internet Marketing maze, some things will appeal to you more than others. For heaven’s sake don’t try to become a pro at it all. Know when to surrender and let someone else take on the task for you. That is why sites like eLance.com are there. There are plenty of people to hire at great rates to assist you in completing tasks.

8. Find a Mentor. All of the great success stories out there can tell you that they had a mentor. A Mentor (or Coach) is someone that you can look to for help. This person is someone who will take the time to answer any and all of your questions and give you the guidance you need to succeed.

By Reed Slidell

Most internet marketers would agree that developing a strategic internet marketing plan has always been a challenge to them as they hardly find the time and commitment to focus on it. With a lot of responsibilities at hand, the attention they allot for it becomes limited. This instance may sound reasonable but giving into it would definitely set drawbacks to any business.

In general a marketing strategy serves as the steering wheel by which you maneuver your entire online business to a specific direction. Opportunities will come and go and your business environment will change inevitably. But with a definite set of objectives and marketing techniques you will always land on the best actions. This goes to show the risks of putting your marketing efforts into waste and ending up guessing about the ideal solutions to your business problems are eliminated.

Contrary to what others believe, your business website should be a major part of your overall internet marketing campaign and planning. Your website which is your primary online marketing means should be aligned with your offline efforts. This is the ideal way for your company to present a consistent style and message to your target audience. Thus, your overall company objectives can be easily achieved.

Your website’s status defines the focus of your techniques. If your website is already up and running, you can now focus on effectively marketing it. If your website needs improvement, you first need to focus on enhancing its features and making it complement your marketing efforts.

It is advisable though that as you develop a marketing scheme, you are creating your website along with it. This can keep your mind focused in the tactics that you will employ in promoting your website. All the same, the objectives and strategies that you have once fixed may change as your time and situation allows it.

A strategic internet marketing plan, in general, focuses on the internet marketing strategies and programs for a certain website belonging to any online or offline business. This online plan includes developing strategies and action plans that are carefully designed to help you reach your marketing goals.

Its parts could be divided into three parts. They are the objective, the marketing strategy and the marketing tactic. Each of these parts plays a significant role to any online marketing success.

All plans start with an objective or a set of objectives. The objective answers the common question most business owners face: “How will I overcome my main marketing challenges?”

Let us say that one of your marketing challenges is how to utilize your website to promote your service and gain an increased profit rate. This will lead you to an objective that reads as: “To develop to your website’s online visibility in order to attract more visits that will soon convert to sales.”

Meanwhile, the marketing strategy defines general approaches that should be observed to attain the objective. In relation to the above-stated objective, the marketing strategies would be: improve online communication and information for your targeted audience; build general awareness of and interest in your company online; effectively communicate your website’s existence and benefits to your current and prospect clients.

Finally, you have the marketing programs or action plans which fall under the name marketing tactic. In connection with the two previous examples, your action plans could involve three steps. These are emerging as authority in your in niche by sharing helpful experiences and information through discussion forums; circulating an email newsletter; registering your website to targeted search engines and directories.