Given the state of the online market in the current recession, wasting money on website marketing might not seem like a very bright idea. In fact it might seem foolish to spend money when you have little hope of recovering it. Yet even now there is enough money in the market to make a decent living. I am not kidding when I say this.
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All you need to know is the way to go about making money. Website marketing is very important to this plan. If your website is invisible you are not going to make any money. So you need to spend money to make money. You might now say that you have no money. You don’t need to spend millions, just a few dollars in the right places can Read more…
There’s just so much good stuff in this book, I might have to turn this into a multi-part series. Chapter 4, “Direct Response Marketing” (from Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet by Jay Conrad Levinson) really got me thinking about how many sites I’ve come across that don’t do anything for the business. In very few cases, having the simplest of ‘brochure websites’ (strictly informational and usually for credibility purposes) may be appropriate, but there are so many opportunities to get your web site to do more for your business.
The easiest thing any website can do is collect your visitor’s contact information. This can be used as a targeted list for your marketing offers (as long as you have their permission of course). There are many things you can offer your visitors in exchange for their contact info (specifically, e-mail address):
Besides a website being a necessity for PR, marketing, credibility and communications, it can also bring in revenue and drive sales. If your business sells a product (or many products), or a service that can be packaged as a product, consider having a storefront on your website. This will allow you to take orders 24/7 from anywhere in the world (you can always limit sales to “domestic” or “local,” but the capability for global sales is there). Additionally, there are options to seamlessly accept orders on your own website, or inexpensively process them on a third party site.
In order to make a sale, companies used to have to sendout an expensive catalog, personally contact potential clients, or wholesale their product to a retailer if they did not have their own store. Today, it is possible to make a sale without a per-customer cost (time or money) or applying a huge wholesale discount. The miracle of the Internet allows Read more…