Marketing is the lifeblood of any business. Marketing builds
awareness. Awareness lets potential customers find out about
your product or service. Just as with a bricks and mortar
business, marketing is essential in order to let people know
your business offer exists.
Although the World Wide Web can be thought of as a media channel
where prospects will see your copy day after day, the truth is
that unless you attract those prospects to your website first
then your efforts are in vain.
The term 'World Wide Web' should really have a fourth word,
'Wilderness', because that's where any website begins and stays
if no efforts are made to attract visitors.
Any business that builds a store, for example, must make efforts
to attract custom in order to succeed. The very same principle
applies online and just as in the offline world, the amount of
benefits reaped is proportional to the amount of effort put in.
In order to maintain any kind of competitive advantage,
sustained efforts must be made with a long term plan in mind.
Compared to traditional offline methods of marketing, one of the
distinct advantages of marketing online is the speed at which
new marketing strategies can be put to test. For example, a pay
per click campaign could be launched and the results analysed
all in a single day. Such campaigns can promote the smallest
businesses amongst the largest industry relevant websites viewed
by thousands of qualified prospects.
One of the greatest Internet marketing fallacies is those
services offering automated submission to hundreds of search
engines as an effective means of search engine promotion. When
80% of all search engine usage is carried out using the three
largest search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN), the only others
worth being included in are those that are highly relevant
and/or localised. This means that automated submission services
such as these can offer limited benefit and then only to those
websites that don't already appear in a search engine's listings.
The effectiveness of these types of automated and unspecific
services quickly becomes diluted when they are made readily
available to all.
For an effective Internet marketing that delivers significant
and measurable results, there is no substitute for a
well-structured, customised approach making the best possible
use of the technologies available.
Building a successful Internet business starts with building a
website and continues with effective marketing.
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