Strategies to market your online business

As marketing will be a big part of your business budget if you really want to take off the ground when starting your biz, you should carefully plan what to do. Before starting it is essential to keep one thing in mind. Whichever strategy you start with, all your marketing activities will not only influence your sales but also the ranking of your website in the search engines. Our five top strategies are highly effective, the more as you do two things first before using them.

The first thing you need to consider is search engine optimization of your website to get the most out of your advertising dollars. It is essential to learn how to optimize your website so it will eventually get ranked in the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The sooner you get started with optimizing your site, the faster it will get ranked. Until some of your pages are ranked in the search engines, your traffic will remain minimal. Consider investing in a book, e-book, e-course, or program of some sort to learn how to optimize your site so you can use the information as you are building it and adding your content. Be sure you're learning the most recent information because the rules change frequently.

The second thing to be done is to write a marketing plan if you haven?t already done so when writing your business plan. If you haven?t written a business plan, please be sure to at least get your marketing plan formalized before you start doing business. Getting your marketing plan thought through and documented is the minimum you should do for your business. When writing your marketing plan, consider the ?who, what, when, and how? you will do your selling and get your products in front of your customer. Then decide which of the following strategies you will implement in that plan and explain how you plan to carry out those strategies.

Now that your site is optimized and your marketing plan is written, it is ready to start marketing your biz with our five strategies.

1. Find Your Niche public. Imagine trying to sell your product or service to the entire world. Unless you are not Microsoft or McDonalds, you won?t be able to reach the whole world. So you should not try to appeal to everyone. On the contrary, it will be essential to your success to as highly target your marketing as possible. It will be by far more easy to cover a niche than the world. Selling your product or service to a small but focused group of people will allow you the luxury of advertising to a smaller but more interested group of people. Since they are more interested, a higher percentage of the group will buy but you will have spent less money pursuing the smaller group. Once you are successful selling to one niche, if your product or service is appealing to another niche, you can create another website and repeat your success using the same strategies you used on the first website.

2. Write Articles. Writing articles with information that is interesting and useful for your niche market will help you gain traffic to your site. When writing an article, include a resource box at the end of the article that includes information about the author (that's you) and a link to your website. Then distribute the article to article directories for other website owners to use on their site or in their newsletters and ezines. This does two things, you gain traffic when someone sees your article on another website and clicks your link and you get a link that points back to your site for the search engines to use to rank your site higher.

3. Start A Newsletter. Having a newsletter is one of the best ways to market to your customers and potential customers. You will need to have a service that will host your list and allow you to send your newsletter. Then you put a sign-up box on your website and your visitors will sign-up. Periodically, you decide how often, you send those who have signed up an email with information that is relevant to your niche. This information could be general info or it could be specifically about your product. To get your visitors to sign-up you can offer a special report, e-course, ebook or anything that would entice them to give you their email address. When you choose the service that will host your email list, be sure they do a double opt-in confirmation of those who subscribe, it's now the law.

4. Link Exchanges. Exchanging links with other websites that have complimentary products or services will not only give you direct traffic from the link but it will also help you with your pursuit to get ranked in the search engines. At the time of this writing, Google is the most widely used search engine, and it's widely known that they consider the number of links pointing to your website as part of the determination where to rank your website.

5. Participate in theme related online forums using a Signature Line in your posts. This is a strategy that could be quite time consuming so don't let it take up huge amounts of your time, however it is quite effective in drawing traffic to your website. Join forums and messageboards that are useful to your niche market and then become part of the community. When you make a post, be sure it's useful and relevant to the information that is being discussed, then at the bottom of your post, sign-off with your name and little blurb about your company with a link to your website. These are often referred to as "sig lines". Be sure to read the forum's guidelines to be sure you're using the proper etiquette in the forum and to be sure signature lines are allowed. If they are not allowed, do not use this strategy in that forum as it could cause you to be banned from that forum.

In this article we covered the top five strategies to market your website and the two things you need to do before you start. Now it's your time to get out and start using some of these strategies.

*article by by Brigitte Jaeger-Dabek