Website Marketing Strategy

The quickest and easiest way to market your website and get traffic is to use paid advertising. When most people talk about paid advertising on the web they talk about PPC (Pay Per Click) such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Well I am going to cover those, as well as, some others that are not talked about as much, but can be just as effective or even better.

Lets start with PPC.

The two main players in PPC are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Each have their advantages and disadvantages so lets go through them each.

Google Adwords - The thing that makes Adwords so great is the amount of traffic you can get. The bad thing about Adwords is the very strict rules and regulations you must follow, the amount of competition, and the dreaded Google Slap.

There are tons of Google Adwords training product out their on the internet just Google "Perry Marshal" and you will learn all you need to know about how to use Adwords effectively.

Yahoo Search Marketing - is like Adwords smaller brother. The same strategies and techniques that work well with Adwords do well in Yahoo. The Difference is that Yahoo has less strict regulations, less competition, and less traffic. But, if you use Adwords you should be using Yahoo as well, because you can usually get traffic for less per click and make a little more profit.

Now that we have PPC covered I want to tell you about another paid advertising opportunity, solo e zine ads. Solo E zine ads are e-mails that you can send out to subscribers of e zine e-mail lists. Now this is not the same as buying or renting an e-mail list, which is never a good idea. This is however, an ad you can place that the e zine owner will send out to their subscribers as a way for them to make money.

The process work like this, you find a e zine that fits your niche and you contact the list owner and ask to submit a solo ad to the e zine subscribers. They usually charge by the 1,000 subscribers so it's say $10 / 1,000 sent e-mails, once you agree on the price and terms you send the owner your e-mail ad you want to have sent out and they review it. Once its approved they send it out to their list. Pretty simple. And, the leads you get are very targeted and generally have a good conversion rate, but this can vary from each e zine, so it is a good idea to do a small test mailing before committing to a full fledged mailing of say 100,000 subscribers.

In this section I want to tell you a little about what SEO is and how you can apply to your website marketing strategy.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of making your website appear in the natural search engine results pages (SERP's) and get you free traffic.

The best thing about SEO is that if can be done for free and will get you free traffic so you make a lot more profit. The problem with SEO is that is take time and a lot of effort to do successfully, there is a steep learning curve, and because the Search Engines are constantly changing is can be a never ending battle. But it is worth it.

SEO is broken down into two factors on page and off page.

On page factors refers to making the page of your website appealing to the search engines by using the right keywords in your text and making sure your internal linking strategy is optimal so that the search engines index and rank the pages for the keywords you want to target.

Off page factors refer to really one thing, links that are coming into your site from other websites. This is arguably the most important aspect of SEO and the hardest. The key here is to get as many "important" sites to link to your site using the keywords you want to rank for as the anchor text of the link.

SEO is a very complex thing to try and explain and I can't do it here, but if you plan on making any money online you need to at least understand the basics so you can start getting free traffic from the search engines. I highly suggest you check Stomping the Search Engines 2 to get a very good education in the art of SEO, this training originally cost $497, but you can get it for $1 here.

Article marketing is one of the oldest forms of web marketing and it is still very effective today. How it works is, you write an article on a topic that is interesting to your target market and post the article to article directories on the web, and when a person searching the web comes upon one of your articles it leads them to your site.

The power of article marketing comes from the relationship you build with the reader as they read your article, this gives you almost instant credibility in their eyes so that when they click through to your site they already trust you and are more likely to buy from you.

The way article marketing is used on the web today has changed from a few years ago, the overall concept is pretty much the same, but the execution and benefits have changed enough so that the way you format your articles and how you distribute them to the web has become much more important.

I have a full on article marketing training course called Article Shotgun and it will teach you the latest in article marketing techniques and practices to get the most from your article marketing campaigns. You can check it out here.

Forum marketing is another website marketing strategy that has been around for a long time, and because of this, it has been subject to much abuse and spamming, but if used correctly can still be very effective.

The key to forum marketing is to become a part of the forum community you want to market to. You want to become a useful contributing member of the forum before you make any attempt to sell them something, even then you have to be very careful on how you do it, the community of the forum will dictate this.

In some forums making a sales pitch is ok and in others it will get cast out so fast you wont even have time to react, so be very careful and make sure you understand what is considered ok and not ok.

In most forums the best way to do this is to create a short blurb in your signature box that leads to a sales page or opt in list. I have found that the best way to do this is to offer something for free, like a free report, and have them opt in to an autoresponer series to download it and do my selling from there and not directly in the forum it's self.