These are The 8 Best Strategies To Get Your Online Business Exposure And Customers, according to the Florida Times Union. The internet is a powerful resource because for most of us, the Internet answers our questions. The Internet has become the No. 1 source of reference material used for practically any project of any size. So, if you’d like to be found and chosen by consumers, provide answers! The following tools are each so powerful in themselves that many businesses that have slightly used even only one have gone on to become ranked on the first page of local search results in the search engines. Make sure all of these are in line, and you’re almost guaranteed success. The website itself. This is the hub where we will be driving all that traffic from the Internet. Forums. Get involved with others, discussing your business practices online. (Good job, looks like you’re already doing that!) Article marketing. You must author and publish articles. It shows that you are the expert, and it's a great tool for directing traffic. Video marketing. Remember to direct the traffic from the video to your product. Online directories. Just locate the hundreds of directories, and start listing your business. Social media. While this might seem like a waste of time, it can be a great traffic generator. Blogs. Daily entries into your blog can create a following of your expertise. E-mail marketing. Use this with an autoresponder to target your prospects and give them what they want from you, not your competition. Develop one of these areas per week (or month – whatever better suits your schedule), and you’ll be up and running in no time. Read the article: http://jacksonville.com/community/nassau/2010-06-10/story/successful-internet-marketing-tools-internet So what do you guys think? Which of these areas is most important to you? What have you developed so far? What do you think is lacking in your own business plan?
Article marketing and forum marketing are the best places to start, because they are free and extremely easy. Social media fits into that category too, assuming you know how to use it properly. Once you get some traffic and income coming in using these methods, e-mail marketing (and list building) should be your next step so you can create a bona fide customer base. I wouldn't call it difficult, but it takes a little more time than whipping up articles or posting on forums, which is why I recommend those methods to start. When you get to the point where you have good traffic, a steady income coming in, and a decent list, you can start playing around with things like video marketing, which I personally find to be more difficult than any of the above methods, but it can be a gold mine if done properly.
I would have to say that some of those methods may get your site seen, but most likely with a bounce.
Hey Guys, thanks for your insights!! I included video marketing here because of its SEO implications. I hear video indexes really high. -Kevin
Only if you apply special codes to the videos. SE bots can not read images or videos, they can only crawl text. Therefore you have to optimize your videos using other techniques in order to have it place well in SERPS. Now, as far as the other techniques you mentioned in the initial posts, some are part of SEO others are not. They are simply ways of increasing targeted traffic to your site. Social media outlets are good ONLY if you develop a strategy to use them. Otherwise you will be wasting your time.
You may want to add SEO -- when your potential client searches for your product or service, you want to be the business or organization they find, not your competitors. By utilizing search engine optimization, you’re getting your website ranked at the top of the search engines. With so many consumers utilizing search engines before purchasing, it’s essential that you place your business above your competitors’ websites.
Video is definitely the way to go in the future - Google is already working hard with their translation and transcription algorithms which means it will start picking up on the actual content of the video, not just the description. Video is also very engaging and can be made on the fly with a $100 camera and some free video editing - simply convert your old posts to new video!
SEO is one of the most powerfull things you can do, given the right skillset to make it happen by the right guy, with the right connections. insite SEO is pretty much very common place now, and lots of people can do at the very least mediocre job with it, needless to say, you need to have insite SEO in good shape aswell, but outsite SEO, external can in the "hype" level of effectiveness done only by a marginal group of people - the same people who make SEO seem sexy, and big business. Those same people mostly talk about it to make it sexy because they are in the business and looking for new clients, and writing about SEO in itself is an excellent SEO initiative. Too many people do too much stuff based on SEO alone imho.