Marketing a website to some people is like running an ad in the paper. You pay for a design, post it on the web, and here come the business. In reality, having a website is a new job, whether it’s you or you hire an outside person. There is a whole new job here, marketing.
Getting the word out about a business without investing in traditional advertising is the challenging at best. It will take time, energy, knowledge, information and especially imagination to put forth your best effort. Here are some ideas for guerrilla marketing in 2008.
If you tend to do most of your business locally you might think you don’t need much of a web presence to reach new customers. If this sounds like your business, you don't need to invest in marketing that reaches beyond your local market, like search engines that reach the whole world.
The beauty of Internet advertising is you can target you advertising reach to as small or large as you need.
I recently started an adwords campaign through “Google Adwords” where I targeted a select group of keywords I thought people would use to search out the products we were selling. The way a Google adword campaign works is you write as small ad that is triggered to pop up when a pre-selected word or phrase is searched. The price per click is determined by how much your competition is willing to pay, to be on top, at the time. If you select “Canon cameras” as you’re your keyword for example , you’ll be competing with the biggest camera dealers in the country. If you select “Concord Canon dealers” as your keyword phrase you immediately reduce the competition for the phrase and the price will be much cheaper. The main difference in my selected keywords and everybody else’s was the additional regional information used to scale my target to the 100-200 mile radius of my local market. After all, I didn’t need to compete with advertisers in the whole country, just the greater Contra Costa area. By selecting these regionally specific terms I would not be competing with larger companies and thus keeping the “adword costs” down. Writing the ad for the campaign takes keyword research and some creativity as the ad is very small, so every word must count. Google has some great tools available to help make your choices. https://adwords.google.com
Podcasts are another great low-cost marketing tool. The reason I like this so much is you can create a very personal message that listeners can use offline wherever they are. I use them all the time, as I download tutorials from a website that teaches Photoshop. I simply download them into my IPOD and have them to listen to for as long as I need. Whenever I’m sitting on a plane or at the dentist office I can stay connected to the site’s author while listening, which creates a relationship, over time. This relationship building creates customer loyalty as if they came to your shop everyday.
Your podcasts should be of interest and value to your target market. What do they need to help their businesses? What valuable information can you share? A once-a-month promotion through all your other marketing channels will give a real synergistic boost to your marketing. Be creative and make it usefull.
By now you’ve all heard of blogging. Blogging is like having a conversation with your target market. It’s interactive and gives your market a chance to talk back to you. Blogging is increasingly being used with all types of businesses because it's a cost-effective way to create marketing buzz and communities of support. And by integrating a blog in your website, it gives your market a forum and another way to reach your prospects. Check out other blogs from competing sites to get familiar with the whole concept.
Having a website in 2008 is nothing like running an ad in the newspaper. It takes time and commitment or it falls into oblivion. I think a lot of people are attracted to this fantasy that a website can generate money with little to no effort. The web is constantly changing and moves way to fast for that. Again, it takes time and commitment!.
by Pat Mosca
Internet Marketing
