An Internet Marketing Strategy
that Works
by Joy Gendusa
You can't put up a beautiful (or any) web site and hope that people
will just arrive. You have to let them know, IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY,
that your web site is there. This HAS to be part of any Internet marketing
strategy you develop. This is actually a basic marketing principle.
Customers are not going to look for you, you have to look for them.
Promoting your web site on-line and building traffic is the subject
of thousands of web sites, e-zines, books, courses and seminars.
Using the web to promote your site, however, assumes that your customers
are surfers. But there is a large percentage of our population that
is not as savvy with the internet as we would like them to be.
So, what about the large percentages of the population who are
not? They will only find out about you through traditional marketing
and public relations media. This is particularly true if you serve
a fairly local market. Fortunately these are the easiest and cheapest
prospects for you to reach off-line.
Key Off-Line Internet Marketing Strategies
Here are some of the ways to make your web site known (this
list was taken directly from the Traffic Building Volume of Ken
Evoy's brilliant book, Make Your Site Sell! 2002:
• TV, print and other advertising
• Stationary and business cards
• Catalogs, fliers, billboards, blimps, etc.
• Direct mail (prominently on every document)
• Telemarketing (make it part of the script)
• News releases to targeted media.
The main principle, to which you can add all your imagination,
is INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY INCLUDES ANY AND ALL MEANS OF GETTING
YOUR WEB SITE KNOWN AND VISITED BY TARGETED PROSPECTS. Unless you
have a high budget, the TV, radio, classified ad route is not recommended
but if you do run ads, be sure to mention your web site everywhere.
Make it part of your Internet Marketing Strategy.
Another guiding principle is that your off-line internet marketing
activities should make it easy for your prospect to go straight
to your web site. One of the best ways to market your website off-line
is direct mail postcards.
If your prospect sees your website on a billboard as she's driving
home, she probably won't look you up when she gets to the office
the next day.
This is not the only medium that has problems like this. Newspapers
are bulky, radio has to spell it out and like before most people
are driving at the time. On the other hand, if your prospect is
sitting at her computer and a post card comes in the mail announcing
your web site, she can just turn around and type in your URL and
she's at your web site.
Now if someone is in the office reading a trade journal and comes
across an article about you in the magazine, it's not difficult
for him to copy your URL into his browser and pay your site a visit.
I don’t mean to say that those other avenues won’t
drive traffic to your site, but it will take numerous impressions
and repetition to get them to remember your address.
On the other hand, direct mail postcards are generally received
at the home or office where a computer is present, and if received
somewhere else they are small enough to keep with you until you
can get to a computer. This way, your prospective customer will
be able to take the take right over to their desk top computer,
type in your address and go right to your site. Brilliant!
I have seen the greatest success in off-line web site promotion
with direct mail, and specifically direct mail postcards.
Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998, her only assets a computer
and a phone. By 2004 the company did close to $9 million in sales
and employed over 60 people. She attributes her explosive growth
to her ability to choose incredible staff and her innate marketing
savvy. Now she’s sharing her marketing secrets with others.
For more free marketing advice, visit her website at http://www.postcardmania.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
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