15Degrees-NORTH Blog

June 29, 2009

Internet Marketing - The Basics

Do you that marketing, whether it is done online, in print or on TV is all basically the same thing; trying to inform potential customers about the product or service you provide and getting them to make a purchase from you. Marketing online is as complicated a prospect as it is in outside of the Internet and there are some truly effective ways to go about and some that are not so effective.

The first thing any marketer needs to know is their target demographic and audience. If you are selling, let's say, summer pool supplies you don't want to advertise on sites that are local to places that are cold most of the time. This would be a waste of resources, time and effort. Look at who you want to sell to and advertise on sites they would go to.

The age group is equally important, if you are promoting a service for, let's say, personal mobility chairs you don't want to advertise on a site mainly frequented by teenagers and young adults. You would want to advertise on medical sites and sites which target senior citizens. Making sure the age demographic is met is very important as well.

Another very important aspect of Internet marketing is the social networking front. Making use of social networking sites such as Twitter, Digg, MySpace and Facebook and other sites like these does this. You can gain a large following of people who are interested in the things you have to offer and give them updates on your services and products on a daily basis.

The best thing about those mentioned sites is that they are all completely free to use and, if you are lucky, you may get people to help advertise for you by posting about you in their social circles. This is the power of social networking, that you can develop a following of people who will, for free, advertise for you just because they want to talk about your products.

The advertising services you use is also very important because using a service such as Google's Adwords is a great way to make sure your ads are targeted to the correct websites without any effort on your part. With Google's Adwords, you create your ad and pay for the service and the system takes care of the rest.

Their systems will, based on the options you set up and the keywords in your ad, target it to site with similar keywords and content. This way your ads are placed on site where people visiting them are already interested in the services or products you supply and this helps to target you more effectively.

Regardless of how you go about Internet Marketing you want to make sure you target your audience by needs and age and that you advertise on sites related to your business. Doing it otherwise will be a waste of your time and money and advertising. The better targeted you are in your ads, the better a response you will receive and the more business you will gain over time.

Mark

Mark at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Internet Marketing | TrackBack (0)

May 28, 2009

Internet Marketing - Social Networking

If you plan on marketing your website online and you don't plan on utilizing the many social networking sites available, you are passing up a golden opportunity to get some serious marketing done. Social networking sites are full of people who are looking for just about everything imaginable and if they can find it online, they will buy it online.
Some of the most popular sites for social networking are:

1. Twitter
2. My Space
3. Facebook
4. Digg It

All of these sites started out as a way to keep in touch with friends and family but quickly blossomed into powerful marketing tools for any type of business there is. The great thing about these sites is that people can choose to follow you on these sites and you can send them up to the minute information about your business.

Of all of these sites, Twitter is probably the most useful and powerful site you can use for marketing purposes. People on Twitter can set up their cell phones to receive updates from the people they are following and because of this, you can literally reach your target audience anytime, anywhere with whatever information you want them to have.

You can also have you website setup in a way that allows visitors to makes Tweets, a Twitter post about what you have on your site. This will show up as a Tweet from that user who is actually promoting your site for free! This allows you to reach out to a whole new group of people who may not be signed up for your information.

My Space and Facebook can also be used as a marketing tool as well and with these you can customize the look of the page as well as place ads and updates about your site. People can also follow you on these sites as well and be updated when you put up new information. The nice thing about these sites is that they include graphics and multimedia to keep your potential customers happy which helps bring them to you and make those all important purchases.

Mark

Mark at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Social Networking | TrackBack (0)

May 12, 2009

Web Design Do's and Don'ts

When designing a website there are a few things to keep in mind throughout the design and implementation of the website. These are:

1. Appearance
2. Ease of Navigation
3. Information

As long as you keep these three things in mind, you should be able to have a good looking, easy to use and informative website.

Appearance

You want the site to look good but not so heavily laden with graphics that is slows the site down or distracts from the information on the website. Graphics should be used mainly to add some attractiveness to the website and highlight certain areas of the site such as specific products. One thing that should never be used on a business website are animated gifs. These are best left to personal websites and should go no further than that.
Flash animation or flash based websites are very nice and rather common now and these take a professional hand to create. However, if overdone, they can be confusing.

Ease of Navigation

Let's face it, if your visitors can't find the information you have on your website, what's the point in having it there in the first place? Making sure people are able to easily navigate your website and get to the places they want to go is very important indeed. If your visitors are unable to navigate your website, they will be unlikely to return and will look for the information elsewhere.

Information

The reason people go to your site in the first place is for information about the topic on which you have built your website. If the information on the site is either outdated or hard to find, your visitors will stop coming to your website.
If you make sure you keep all of these aspects in mind at all times your website will be easy to use, full of information and attractive enough to keep people coming back again and again.

Mark

Mark at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Web Design | TrackBack (0)

April 16, 2009

To Blog or Not To Blog?

In reality, this is not a question. Blogging is now the most common form of new business websites around. Not only is it easy to post brand new information from almost anywhere, including cell phones, the set up of a blog is really very simple. One of the most popular blogging software suites is Word Press so we will focus on that.

With Word Press, the setup of the program is almost completely automatic. The only thing you need to set up is a database and input that information in a file on your server so the blog is able to communicate with it. Once you have this established, and it only takes a few minutes and you are pretty much ready to start blogging.

You can also customize blogs to have almost any look and feel you want with thousands of possible themes to choose from; some free and others you may have to pay for. However, you can easily run a Word Press blog with a free theme forever and not have to ever pay a cent for the software at all.

Word Press blogs are also ready to go for advertising because they feature an add-on specifically designed to handle information from Adwords and other ad software sites. All you have to do is paste the code and activate it and your ads will appear on the site. You can also choose from hundreds of other add-ons so the site is exactly the way you want it.
One of the add-on's that comes with Word Press is a SEO pack. This makes it a lot easier to optimize your website for search engines thus making your site more attractive and more searchable. The better positioned you are on a search engine, the more traffic you will receive and the more money you will make.

Most blog sites also allow people to be able to choose how they receive information from your blog whether though email, newsletter and or via cell phone. So as long as you keep the information relevant and up to date, people will come back to read more. You can make sure of this by adding interesting posts and various articles to your site to keep the interest going.

Mark

Mark at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Blogging | TrackBack (0)

March 9, 2009

Internet Marketing 101

Marketing is the art of getting your name and product's information out to the public and in normal cases this is done through newspapers, television and other such types of ads. Online, however, there are some different ways that you can effectively market yourself to get your name and URL known to the world.

There are different ways to do this and they are:

1. Ads - these are placed on other websites to get people to go to your website
2. SEO - search engine optimization
3. Link Exchanges - where you and another website trade links to each get more hits
4. Social Networking - such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace

These are all effective ways of getting your name out there. You may want to go with some of the less expensive to completely free ways to market your site. The free ways are not always the more effective ways to market your site but they are still rather effective, especially if you are just starting out and don't have much of a budget.

The most time intensive of all of the methods would be Social Networking. While not specifically marketing, it can, and is used as a marketing tool by many people. While this method can be very helpful and effective, it also takes up a great deal of time in both preparation as well as continual execution.

Placing ads on other websites through and ad service such as Google's Adwords is also very effective however this method does cost money. The nice thing about Adwords is that your ads are targeted to specific website which are about the things you are marketing thus giving you more exposure to the right client base.

Through SEO you can make your website much more attractive to search engines which will drive more traffic your way thus potentially allowing you to generate more earnings. While this is really not marketing, it is a great tool that gives you much more exposure.
Making use of all the above mentioned types of marketing will definitely generate more hits to your website which equals out as more earnings for you.

Mark

Mark at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Internet Marketing | TrackBack (0)