Online Marketing Strategies That Work

April 18, 2006

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If you own a website or other business on the internet, you need customers. With all the competing websites, how do they find you? You need to have some good strategies for marketing an online business if you are to be successful. One of the most used strategies for marketing an online business is learning to get a high search engine ranking. If you don't rank highly you may have difficulty being found. There are some key methods for high ranking. Start by keeping everything on your site relevant to the subject. This makes good sense anyway because once the customer has found you, you want him to stick around. Choose a domain name and website title that fit well with your business keywords. Your title should be easy to remember. Links to your website make a difference in search engine rankings, so contact sites that offer information complementing yours and ask for reciprocal links. One of the best ways to get links to your website is to write well keyworded articles about it. There are literally thousands upon thousands of article directories online that can provide one way links back to your website. This is "THE" most effective way to obtaining a page rank. More commonly used now is article submission software that makes it easy to submit to these article directories. There are of course companies out there that do this for you for a small fee. Just be aware that this information can change as search engines redesign their methods for relevant results.

Using pay-per-click advertising is another effective and fast way to get listed high in the search engines. There are several providers of pay-per-click advertising. Some examples are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter. Make sure when signing on to a pay-per-click advertising campaign to experiment with your ads to see which are most effective. Then when you find a good ad that has a high click through rate you can delete the rest. It pays to check out a variety of pay-per-click advertisers to see which suits your needs the best.

Weblogs or more commonly known as "Blogs" are a newer source for marketing an online business. They tend to rank well, and consumers like them. Use your blog to talk about your industry and provide links to your website. Since everyone and their dog now has a blog there are problems that arise though. Spam is a big problem in todays online world and measures have been taken to stop all the spam. The popular free blog host "Blogger.com" has been cancelling accounts for such use. The best way to divert this problem is to host your own blog on your server. Bloggers publishing feature allows you to publish to blogspot or your own server. Using this feature to publish to your own FTP server is a way you can put what ever you like on your blog and not be penalized for spam.

And last but not least is the use of traffic exchanges. Considered by many to be ineffective, a well made and presentable splash page or squeeze page that has an information gathering form can convert surfers into customers and even repeat customers. When searching for traffic exchanges be sure to check them out first. Make sure that the traffic exchange your going to join is a well known, high ranked program.

Marketing an online business is essential for success. Using all the marketing strategies at your disposal together will ensure that your traffic grows and you edge out your competition.