Marketing and Promoting Your Home-Based Internet Business
Just like any other business, unless you let people know that you have a business, no one will show up.
For a home-based internet business there are basically two ways to market and promote your business:
- Traditional forms of advertising and marketing, such as TV, Radio, the Yellow Pages and regular ads in the local paper together with the odd letter box drop are all well known ways to get your business known and customers through the door.
- Online marketing and advertising. This will be less familiar to most of you and involves many different techniques
This page will deal with the second way, as we are talking about setting up a home-based internet business, not a traditional shop type business.
Overview
A home based internet business is not all that different, however, when you're using the internet to promote and market your business, there are several additional factors that you'll need to consider and steps you will need to implement.
Some of these include:
- SEO/SEM - Search engine optimisation/marketing
- PPC - Pay Per Click advertising
- Ezine Publishing - Electronic Magazine Publishing (Publishing articles related to your business)
- Link-building
- Establish Credibility and Trust
There are other methods to promote your internet business, however, the list above includes all the major marketing methods that will help to promote you business online.
Let's look at each of these and take out some of the mystery.
SEO/SEM or Search Engine Optimisation/Search Engine Marketing
SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.
The goal of any web site is to be found by Google, Yahoo and MSN as well as all the other search engines that allow people to search for and find the information they are looking for. Once you've decided on what products or services you are going to provide via your home-based internet business, you will need to consider optimising your web site so that it will be found in Google and all the other search engines. You may want to pay a professional to do this for you, as the depth of knowledge required will take you many months to obtain.
As Google is used by most people to find what they are looking for, we will focus on this search engine. This is basically how Google works:
Google uses a complex algorithm that determines which web site is listed first, second, third, etc. One way it does this is by 'reading' each of the pages of your web site and looks specifically at the Title, Description, Headings, and the over all content, which respect to a specific keyword or keyword phrase.
In addition, Google also looks at how many other web sites on the internet link to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site, the more 'credibility' you have with Google and therefore the higher your site will rank in the results (high is good - you want your web site to be on the first or at least the second page of Google's results page).
SEM - Search engine marketing
SEM is about search engine marketing of which SEO is a sub-set. SEM includes using marketing techniques to promote your web site and receive links (see example above) to your site from other sources both on and off the internet. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your web site.
Other Marketing & Promotional Tools
PPC - Pay-Per-Click
PPC stands for pay-per-click advertising. These are advertisements that generally get listed on top and the right-hand-side on Google's search results page. Pay per Click is an advertising model where businesses pay an agreed upon amount, each time their advertisement is "clicked", not each time their ad is displayed. Advertisers typically setup ppc on a PPC network and define how much they are willing to spend for each click-through that they receive.
Advertisers select keywords, keyword phrases, keyword groups, or categories in which they want their advertisements to appear. Advertisers willing to spend the most money for a relevant advertisement will generally be listed first. Google's PPC ranking system assesses CPC (cost per click), ad relevance, click through rate, and daily budget, so the order on which the ads appear is based on a number of factors. Other search engines also have a ppc advertising model which works in a similar way to that of Google.
Ezine Publishing
Ezine basically stands for electronic magazine E-zine. One way to attract links from other sites is to regularly publish original, informative articles in article directories. If these articles are deemed of high quality by the readers, they are likely to send them to friends, family members and business associates who in turn may publish them on their site, or keep the article to refer to at a later date when they are ready to buy your product or service.
Ezine is also sometimes used as an alternative to 'Newsletter'. A newsletter (or electronic magazine) is a very useful tool to stay in touch with your customers and is a great way to expand your business.
Newsletters and articles published in ezines are a great way to achieve this. It will take time, but eventually your information, if deemed useful, will spread all over the internet with links pointing back to your web site.
Link Building
Link building is part of SEO/SEM and there are literally hundreds (actually millions) of pages on the internet that deal with these topics. So I'm not going to cover all the details here, other than to provide you with a basic insight into what they are and why you need to know about them.
Link building can be a time consuming and often frustrating exercise. However, it is probably the major factor determining your success in being found in search engines. Google's algorithm, at list at this time (2009), considers the number of links pointing to your site from other related sites very highly. The more links you have coming to your site the higher your web site will be listed on their results page for a given keyword or key phrase. It is certainly not the only way, but does, at this time, have a major influence.
Link building involves a site owner (you) approaching other site owners who's web site is thematically related. For example you have a home-based internet business that sells wooden toys and as such any other site that offers toys for sale would be a good, related site to attempt to get a link to your web site from, provided the web site offering toys is a quality web site (more on what is a quality site later). In addition, because wooden toys are primarily used by children, other sites that focus on children may also be a good source of web sites where the owners may consider linking to your site. Gifts, children's games, children's clothing, etc., may also be 'related' site and therefore a source for links to your site.
You may already have come across this unknowingly. Many/most web sites have a link called 'resources' or 'other sites of interest' where they list a bunch of other web sites. When you click on the heading of one of these resources listed on their resource page, you usually go to a different site that has some related information to the site you originally visited.
In Summary
All of these techniques in one way or another will help you to promote your web site and attract customers. Some of them are more complex and difficult to implement than others, but they do represent the bulk of techniques to promote and market your internet business online. You will need to work on each of these (or pay someone else to do it for you) in order to increase your Google Ranking and exposure online on a weekly basis if you want to succeed.
As a home-based internet business you generally don't have a physical shop-front type business presence and are primarily accessible only via phone or via contact information on your web site. It is therefore imperative that you establish your business as a credible, legitimate business and promote yourself as an expert in your field/industry.
The traditional forms of advertising are still important, as you will want to start promoting your home-based internet business to as many people as possible, as soon as possible. Using these will give your business immediate exposure and traffic to your web site.
I would strongly recommend you engage a professional to help you get started. Planning, designing and optimising a web site is much more complex than it appears and involves ever changing techniques. Unless you are already very familiar with the concepts described on these pages, you will find it a very steep learning curve - rewarding when you get it right, sure, but it can take many months or even years to become proficient in all the different steps involved and your business may not have that much time to wait...
GO TO STEP XXXX -> NAME THE STEP.