Ten Ways to Market your eBusiness
By Dan Boudreau
Successful e-businesses are built using effective marketing strategies.
Once you have proven your business model offline, consider selling your wares on the web. With more and more people using and buying goods via the Internet, smart business owners are turning to online methods as a way to reach more customers and increase revenues.
Yet, e-businesses are destined to flounder unless they’re supported by effective marketing strategies and techniques. Here are ten ways to ensure your Internet marketing efforts get the results you want.
- Register your domain. A domain is your address to the Internet world. It’s the real estate that your e-business will occupy. Ideally, a healthy domain name should include words that people will think of and key in to search engines to find you.
- Create a website. Know the purpose of your website. Is it a brochure, designed to get customers to call you, or is it a full ecommerce site with a shopping cart, intended to motivate folks to lunge for their credit cards and buy a whack of goods?
- Start a blog. Blogs are web logs or online journals. From a business perspective, blogs can provide an informal presence and an opportunity to interact with customers or readers. A blog can become your casual way of keeping readers updated and interested. Blogs tend to do well in the search engine ranking because they make it easy to provide frequent updates.
- Provide content. At your website, post information, articles and videos that provide value and attract visitors. This means publishing relevant information populated with the keywords people will use to search for your website.
- Publish an e-zine. E-zines are electronic newsletters that are delivered to subscriber’s inboxes. They are most often free and must be opt-in, which means users can subscribe or unsubscribe at will.
- Interact at social networking websites. Facebook offers a fan page option that is ideal for business marketing. Each social networking website has its unique flavour or culture. Visit a few to learn which are best suited to your business. Aside from Facebook, check out Twitter, LinkedIn, and Plaxo.
- Offer online webinars and teleseminars. These should be educational and on topics of interest to your customers. They can be marketed for a fee or provided free.
- Offer freebies. Everybody loves to get something for free. A common strategy is to offer a gift as a bonus for subscribing to an e-zine or opt-in list. E-books make excellent freebies because they can be made available as downloads at no cost to the business providing the bonus.
- Publish testimonials. Testimonials and endorsements from satisfied customers help build credibility and trust. They can be effective in written, audio or video format.
- Take advantage of all communications. Answer your email promptly. Be friendly and helpful. Each engagement is an opportunity to build your community. Where appropriate, ask for feedback. In the signature file at the bottom of your email messages, advertise your goods and include links back to your website.
Even though your e-business is online, don’t overlook the importance of marketing offline as well. For most small businesses, online marketing is simply a wise addition to tried and true offline strategies and methods.
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“Dan Boudreau is President and CEO of Macrolink Action Plans Inc and the RiskBuster Business Plan Oasis at http://www.riskbuster.com Writing your own business plan can be easy, fast and fun! Instantly download a free copy of Dan’s popular fast-track business plan template, The Shell, when you subscribe to the RiskBuster Oasis Insider at http://www.riskbuster.com”
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