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How to Market Your Business Online
By Robert Elliottwww.businessconsultancyonestopshop.com
 
February 24
th
2009
Many business owners see the web as the “Promised Land” for creating new revenue fortheir organisation. Whilst this is certainly true, these companies fail to take into accountthe difficulties of the overcrowded marketplace they are entering into. Many businessowners have the misguided belief that: “If you build it they will come”. These sentimentsshould be reserved for Hollywood movies. In actual fact, nothing can be further from thetruth. From the start of their endeavours, their sentiments should have been “If youMarket it they will come”. Marketing is the key to any successful online business. There are numerous ways to generate traffic to a website, each with their advantagesand disadvantages. Budget lines for these marketing methods vary dependent on theindustry you’re in, so upon deciding your marketing method, it is essential to check outyour competition in these areas to determine budget.
Online marketing methodsPay per click (PPC)
 There are many PPC services available. The most widely known is Google AdWords, whilstothers include Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter. PPC will give a businessimmediate Target Traffic. In most cases a working PPC campaign can be setup in a matterof days. PPC also offers the clearest track ability in terms of sales and return oninvestment (ROI). There is only one major disadvantage to PPC and that is the cost associated with it. These are payable even if it does result in a conversion, therefore there is a possibility of spending more than you make on the sale. To check out the cost associated with yourselected industry I suggest using the Google keyword tool and follow the instructions.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If PPC is a sprint; SEO is a marathon. The short term effects of SEO are very limited,although once an effective SEO campaign is in full swing, its effects don’t incur anycharges for a click through. This type of marketing provides a wealth of traffic throughlong tail and short tail keyword search terms. Unfortunately it is much harder to calculateROI with an SEO campaign.If you’re looking at procuring long term business on the web, SEO is simply a must andthe sooner you start the quicker you will make money with this method. It is always agood idea to look at your competition for the natural search term before the creation of your website. Look at the number of results for your key industry terms. This can befound by typing in your term to a search engine. In the results on the right hand side youwill see how many other people are targeting that term. Anything above ten millionresults and you’re probably looking at least six months of hard work to get to the positionyou want to be at, the first page of the search engine results.Another thing to look at is page-rank. Don’t obsess over this but check out the page-rankof your top twenty competitors using Google toolbar. If most of your competitions page-rank is above four then you are going to need a very weighty budget.
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