Promote Your Website

Without an effective Internet marketing strategy, no online business can succeed. The definition of marketing is anything you do to get or keep a customer. These 10 Internet marketing tips will help you to get customers as well as keep them!

1. Make the Benefits to Your Customer Easy to Recognize

Your customer's perception of your company is entirely different than yours. When you determine what product or service you're going to offer, make sure that it is advantageous to the customer - not just to yourself.

Your customer's wants and needs come first, your profits come later.

2. Don't Try to Be Everything to Everybody

It's sometimes difficult to serve everyone at the same time and be good at it. Be a specialist! The customers will appreciate your company for the helpful and knowledgeable service. Also, customers trust companies more when they specialize in one thing.

This is not to say that you can't offer related products or services. You can and should offer products or services that are related to your online business. Your customers will appreciate that too!

3. Get Referrals

Word of mouth is the least expensive and most effective way to get new business. You can double or even triple your profits by getting your past customers to refer their friends to you. This is a powerful tool for Internet marketing!

4. Market Your Internet Company Online

There are many avenues you can use to market your company on the net. Take advantage of the e-mail system, newsgroups, link trades, and search engines. These are profitable, effective, and very inexpensive! The way I achieve this part is with an auto responder mail system by Aweber .

It's so much more than a mailing system that I won't go into it here. To see the marvels of this system which will help you to automate this important phase of your business, go to my article about mailing lists. You'll be glad you did.

5. Instead Of Selling, Help Your Customer To Buy

Your profits come from your customers, so help them. When a customer visits your website, help them to buy your product.

Make your website clear and simple. Your product or service that you're presenting should be valuable, dependable, durable, interesting, and beneficial to the customer. Make it easy for the customer to purchase the product once the decision is made. Give them an opportunity to fall in love with your site. Building a relationship with your customers will bring them back time and time again.

6. Find Other Companies On Net That Reach The Same Target Customers And Partner Up With Them

You can get together with other companies that sell related products or services and form a joint venture with them. Special promotions involving both your products and theirs can bring great benefits to your customers and your associate's customers. You will promote the new product along with yours to your customers (past and present) adding extra value to your site. And, the partner company returns the favor!!! It's a great way to generate traffic and everybody wins.

7. Offer A Strong Guarantee

A strong guarantee makes it safe for prospects to give you a try. A customer who is indecisive about your product or service may go ahead and give you a try if there's no risk. The guarantee will push many customers "over the edge" when there's doubt about making the purchase.

View an example of our very own "Keep Your Knowledge" Guarantee to see how powerful it looks. But, be sure you can deliver what you promise before offering a guarantee.

8. Be Personal

Speak to your customers in 1st person when possible on your Internet site. Make them feel at home. When you do any writing on your site or in promotions, try to write as though you are face to face with your customer. You will gain the trust of your customers and more sales will come your way by giving your site a personal feel.

Make sure your site says; "There is a person on the other end and not a computer."

9. Create Free Publicity

Make a name for yourself in your industry by finding ways to get publicized. If there is anything you can do on the Internet that is unique and might be considered news, you may get free publicity. Sending out press releases to newspapers and magazines about your Internet site could be very profitable for your Internet business.

Or, another fantastic way to reach and keep customers coming back to your site is with a mailing list. This is the simplest way to establish rapport with your target audience.

To start your mailing list you can use a mailing list company such as Aweber. I've included a link below if you'd like to try out their free demo

If you don't have the time to send out your release you can check with the good people over at Majon International who will write and/or distribute it for you. What's unique about your Internet company?

10. Be Consistent In Your Marketing Techniques

All the Internet marketing avenues you take should have the same focus and look. Your logo or company trademark will become noticed and remembered by customers.

This will establish you as a reputable company on the Internet. Your company can grow if you will remain consistent. Another little tip - If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

When you find an Internet marketing strategy that works - keep doing it until it stops working!

Top 10 Marketing Tips

1. Become a student of your business. Study your customer, competitors and the industry trends. Make it one of your goals to become an ‘expert’ in your business, so much so that you know how your customers think. The more you know, the easier you will find it to get customers and give them compelling messages that convince them to buy your product or service.


2. Sit down with a friend or business contact and get them to put themselves in your customer’s shoes. Try to come up with ten new ways to market and promote your business. It’s really difficult to come up with these ideas yourself as sometimes you can get too close to your business, but someone else can often give you fresh ideas.


3. Remember that not everything you do to market your business will get you clients. Some things you do will be better for building your reputation or getting awareness of your business (PR for instance is very good at getting people to recognise your business is out there) than getting you clients. You need to have a good mixture of marketing activities designed to build your reputation, get awareness of your business and actually get your customers in order to market your business.



4. If you hate a particular aspect of marketing your business, don’t do it! For instance, if you hate cold calling, why push yourself to do it? There are loads of methods that you might like doing more AND don’t cost a great deal to do.


5. Do marketing!! Most small business owners don’t like marketing. It’s another activity that eats into their time. And on top of that, it’s not much fun. Ideally though, you should be spending 2 half days a week on marketing (at the very least), so choose something from my list of 50 ideas and do it!!


6. Decide what is a marketing activity for you – marketing for me is any activity where I spend time getting new or looking after existing customers (bar working on their projects). So, marketing could be emailing 5 customers a week to see how they’re getting on; writing a proposal; going to a networking event; seeing a potential new customer etc.
Why is defining what marketing is important? Well, once you start doing this, you will realise that you are doing some marketing…then it becomes easier to do more.


7. Stretch your comfort zone – write down what activities you’re comfortable with and also write down which ones you’re not comfortable with. Then choose one activity you don’t really like doing every month and get on with it!!


8. Most of us are very good at following up if we need to. For example, if I said to you “Here is a potential customer” you would probably contact them. But, how many of us follow up without a real reason? Try this exercise – next time you go to a networking event, get the list of attendees (usually available when you sign in) and then contact all those you haven’t met by email asking if they would mind spending 15 minutes on the phone with you so you can find out a bit more about each other. This is excellent for building relationships and may even get you clients too!!


9. Remember marketing is like riding a bike. Most people start off by peddling really hard (doing lots of marketing) and when they get busy and don’t market their business, they can coast for a while. But, if they don’t start to market their business again soon, their bike will stop and believe me, it’s hard work to start peddling again. So, you need to keep marketing all the time.


10. We’ve created a new e-course called “Survive your first year in business”, where you’ll receive a workbook every month direct to your PC that helps you address issues such as getting more customers, keeping motivated, managing your finances and making the most of your time. As well as this, you’ll receive 12 months of unlimited e-mail support and coaching whenever you need it, all for just £25+VAT per month.