Online marketing has become a necessary evil but in a good way. You can now compete on level ground with larger companies and reach your target audience at a fraction of the traditional cost. However, cost is not the only advantage of online marketing….it also helps reduce the time-to-market and has many other benefits and that is why this article is being written in the first place! Some of the beginner level steps for online marketing include:

1) Getting a web site: Important steps in getting a web site include booking a relevant domain name, buying space on a server (hosting) and using either a template based or custom web site design. You will need to have the objective of the web site planned before you start doing all this and that should get you going in the right direction. There are many online services which can provide you all the required services in one location and that is best suited for cases where you do not have a friend or family member who can offer tech help.

2) Make it interesting: With billions of web pages dotting the internet, it has become important to make your web site interesting. You can enhance the look and feel of the web site with the latest technology such as AJAX and FLEX. Other than that, you can also add interesting content, interactive sessions like RSS feeds, competitions and transactions to make users come back to your web site. Though the internet has become highly competitive, it has also got many tools which make your web site attractive.

3) If you pick up a magazine, you notice that the quality of the magazine is determined by its content. A web site is also similar and the quality of content determines how many users hit your web site. Apart from getting professional marketing content, you might also like to explore the possibility of having blogs, regular newsletters and interesting white papers on your site more ’sticky’. Web 2.0 revolves around more interesting content and that in itself is something worth talking about.

4) An important aspect of a web site is the ability to let users get in touch with you easily and thus you can feature all types of contact data on it. Implementing an easy to use contact form, easy to find email address can help increase the success rate of your web site by as much as 50%!

5) Depending on the budget you have, online web promotion packages can be purchased from many reputed vendors. Try and use a supplier which has a good reputation and is easily available on the phone. Strictly avoid using suppliers who communicate via automated systems as they are not going to be of much help during a critical time.

6) One of the best ways to promote your web entity is through the traditional mediums of marketing which you might already be using such as print advertisements, visiting cards, display ads etc. Subtle advertising includes a system where everyone in the company uses company email addresses such as yourname@yourcompany.com and it in turn popularizes the web site with customers, suppliers and all external parties.

These first steps towards online marketing should be able to get you the desired results and get you going towards generation of good business leads in record time.

- Kavita Jhunjhunwala
kavita@webspiders.com

If you enjoyed this post then make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed.