Effective Online Marketing
by Elwin Siew
I have been doing some Online Marketing for my website Easybets Online at http://www.easybets.com, Take a look!
There are a few things, which an online marketer must not miss:
1. Is your website ready?
Basically, it is important that a website is well equipped with contents, information like products/services and corporate info. There are quite a few sites, which provide very good website tune-up.
http://www.websitegarage.com
http://www.netmechanic.com
Having a good layout and so on is important but the following items should be kept in mind as well:
a) HTML should not be too complicated
b) Use Tables/Frames
c) Large Graphics effect download time
Next, a good website must have good "catchy" Titles and good, short, precise site description and related keywords.
One point every website owner must remember, too many repeated keywords in your tagging are considered Spam to major Search Engines. Instead of trying to get Top 10 positioning, you are even lucky to get Top 100. Take a look at Easybets' Tags (open its source and you can view the title tag and so on) http://www.easybets.com.
You can also see what I've done with my metatags by looking at this webpage. The instructions are fairly simple. Open your document in html code (for me, I go to "HTML Source" in my "Edit" commands in Adobe Pagemill).
Then, under the line marked, put under <title> (and description text), you copy the following text and paste it in:
<meta name=description
content="Training ...">
<meta name=keywords
content="teambuilding,performance">
For what I have in " xxx" you should copy into the training content a descrption of what this site is for. In the keywords content, you should select some appropriate keywords. If you do not put a blank in front of the word, you can use more of them. Search engines appear to have different specifications for the number of keywords they allow. Some also have rigid rules about duplication of that word and may not list you if you said, "teams, teams, teams..." for example.
2. Online Submission
Nearly 90% of traffic in most websites comes from search engines. This fact was demonstrated by the Seventh WWW user Survey conducted by Georgia Institute of Technology, October 1997.
Our objective should be targeting towards Top 10 position in Search Engines. There is numerous Free software available on the market that does online submission for FREE. A couple of the many good ones are Hurricane Web-promo and Add Web. Another good software, which tracks website positioning of the top search engines is Web Position http://www.webposition.com.
Submit to as many search engines and directories as possible, but remember not to Spam the search engines. Search engines will treat frequent submissions or multiple submissions as Spamming. Instead of being indexed, you are barred from being indexed, so the trick is to submit alternately.
Another tip is, track and understand your competitor's website and its ranking. Study the design, title, keywords and such. Don't be surprised to find that by doing so your rankings increase tremendously.
3. Online Marketing
Known for exposures is Banner Advertising. Buying advertising space can be really expensive nowadays, paying high CPMs, sponsorships and etc. With limited budgets you can actually purchase banner space even Yahoo! AltaVista and major popular sites. This can be done by purchasing your banner ads space from auction sites like http://www.adauction.com which offers cheap cpms for top sites like Yahoo, expedia and many more. Why Pay More?? If you can get it at cheaper rates do it.
4. Integrated Marketing
Integrated marketing is the practice of leveraging several forms of media simultaneously. However, the concept has undergone a transformation with the explosion of the Internet.
In the advent of interactive marketing, we must not forget the traditional medium. I have read some great articles from Zd Net by Jesse Berst on "Spiral Branding"... it combines all mostly popular medium for internet marketing.
Television/Print ----> Online ------> Emails
First, you use TV, print or radio to get people interested and send them to the Web.
Second, you use the Web to get those customers involved. You also collect their email addresses.
Third, you use email to remind and incent them to return to TV and the Web again. Email closes the loop and starts people around the spiral again.
1. TV/Radio/Print -> Online ->Email
2. Interest -> Involvement -> Interaction
3. Passive -> Active -> Interactive
4. Attention -> Intention -> Retention
5. Richness -> Rewards -> Relationship
7. Content -> Convenience -> Communication
8. Selling -> Service -> Suggestion
by Jesse Berst, ZDnet
Important to remember I3 Marketing Campaign by Elvin Siew
Innovative-Interactive-Integrated Marketing Campaign!
Elvin Siew, Regional Marketing Manager
back to Consulting Articles Page
back to Articles and Other Writings