Article by April Ray
Photo Credit: Dasha & Mari
Magazine: Issue #29
Online marketing is confusing…!!
…At least it was for me when I first started way back in 2009.
The strategies haven’t changed much since then but, putting it all together was like pulling one hair at a time from my rather large head- painful to say the least. Maybe you feel the same way. Maybe you’re not quite sure where to start or what you should or should not be doing to promote your business online.
There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to building an online marketing business, I’m going to attempt to give you a few basic nuggets to jump from that will hopefully take you from CLUELESS to A LITTLE LESS CLUELESS in 5 simple steps. ;)
1| Online Marketing Strategies #1- Defining a Keyword Strategy.
In the simplest explanation of how online marketing works, people use keywords to find your site which increases your sales. Of course, it's much more complicated than that, but that does give you a sense of just how important your keyword strategy is. Keywords are the words that people type into search engines to find what they are looking for. If you're a dog grooming company in Boise, some of your keywords will be "Boise" and "dog grooming". But because you're probably not the only groomer in Boise, you're going to have competition out there for those keywords. That's where your keyword strategy comes into play. The goal here is to find keywords that have a high search volume but low competition. This means that people are searching for these keywords, but your competition hasn't optimized their sites for those words. By using keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner from Adwords or Wordstream's keyword tool (both free), you can research and plan your keyword strategy effectively.
2| Online Marketing Strategies #2-Optimizing your Website to Increase your Online Presence.
Once you have your keywords, it's time to use them in order to optimize your website. Optimizing simply means creating a website that is more easily found by search engines. To do this, you'll need to sprinkle your keywords throughout the content on your page, including site titles, tag lines, your URL, alternative text, in your subtitles, etc. Basically, you want the keywords to show up so that when a query is entered by your potential customer or when a search engine crawls your site and indexes your pages, it will understand that your site is relevant to those keywords. The search engine will then direct traffic to your site, thus increasing the chances that you make a sale, which is the goal of online marketing.
Tip - If you don’t have a website... get one!
