Marketing StrategyWritten by Brandon Milford
Marketing Strategy By Brandon Milford With plethora of websites online and hundreds added each day, how are you going to separate your website from others? When I began my first online venture I was so excited to have my website up and running and I remember thinking “wow, toughest part is behind me”, referring to finally getting aesthetics and functionality of website just how I wanted them. I thought that marketing website would be easy part. Boy was I wrong. My site was up and running and was designed very professionally. I had no doubt that visitors would be confident in my ability to deliver top notch services. The only problem was that I had very few visitors. I made a couple of ignorant marketing mistakes early on that cost me. One mistake was simply not planning. I had no plan in place on how I would go about marketing website and reaching my target market. I really had not even truly defined my target market. Sure, I thought about it a lot, but I had not written down who my target market consisted of. I find that actually writing down your goals in business and life is key to your reaching them. By writing down what you wish to accomplish you can have your plan there in front of you and it makes it easy to analyze and ask yourself if you are taking correct steps to achieve your goals. How on earth could I have expected to successfully market website if I had not defined my niche market and written out my course of action on how to position my business within this group? So what sort of things should you think about when planning your marketing strategy? Here’s a basic list to get you on right track.Basic Steps to Planning Your Marketing Strategy 1. Decide whether you are going to sell products, services or both. 2. Test waters to ensure that there is a legitimate demand for your product and/or service. Do this by simply talking to friends and family and ask them if they would find your offerings useful. Also, make up a short questionnaire and have people fill them out. On questionnaire include questions pertaining to problem that you are solving with your products/services. This will give you insight into number of people that are experiencing this problem as well. Also on this questionnaire include questions such as “What magazines/newspapers do you read?” “What type of websites do you most often view?” What we are now doing is ensuring that there is indeed a market for our products/services and at same time gathering valuable information on how to place our products in front of them and others like them, once we bring our products/services to market. Use your imagination and ask other insightful questions that will give you additional information into their lifestyle, shopping habits, and tastes/preferences. Now we have proof that there is a demand for our products/services and information on how to target this market. 3. Get your website up and running and optimize it for search engines before submitting it. Please see my article for more on this topic. 4. Take information you gathered in step two and decide how you will place your products/services in front of your niche market.
| | Were You Bamboozled by Google?Written by Diane Hughes
It’s still happening. "Florida," "Boston," "Ginger," and "Brandy" are just a few of many Google updates that have hit within last few months. And Google is still issuing periodic updates as we speak. No one can say for sure what’s going on or what to expect. One thing is for sure... unless you want to get bamboozled by Google (again!), you’d be wise to take action to prevent it now.So many people were screaming (and still are) about losing tons of business due to Google’s updates. Some have reported 30%, 50%, or even total losses. What can you do? After all, you’re at mercy of Google, right? WRONG! Why Do Rankings Keep Changing? Google, like many other engines, changes its algorithm (formula for calculating who ranks where) from time-to-time in an effort to filter out spammers and deliver most relevant search results possible. Google has had updates since its very beginning. But now, depending on which theory you choose to believe, they are making more advancements that require more updates. This means, even if you rank at #1 this week, you might not make top 30 next week. How Do You Protect Yourself From Updates? Diversify! It is never a good idea to have all your income generated by one source. You wouldn’t depend on having all of your retirement savings from one source (that’s exactly why mutual funds are so popular), and you wouldn’t have all of your money in one bank. I mean, really! What if that one source went under? The same principle applies to Internet marketing.
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