When you start an Online Business, the tasks involved in marketing can seem quite daunting – not only from a time perspective, but from a budgeting stance.
You know the importance of marketing, but how can you prioritise your efforts, especially if your budget is limited?
First Things First
When you first start out, chances are your marketing and online advertising dollars are restricted to just the basics. This would include things such as getting your domain name, website design, hosting service, a shopping cart, and a credit card merchant account. These are simply the necessities if you are going to sell something on the internet. Without them, your business is stalled.
At this point, there’s a few things you can do in exchange for nothing but time, such as submitting your site to search engines, keyword research, writing keyword-rich content, etc. Your website is going to be in Google’s sandbox for a while, anyway, so this is not the time to start an advertising campaign. Wait until your pages have been indexed in order to get the biggest bang for your buck.
Growing Your Online Business
Once your site is out of the sandbox and you begin making online sales, it is time to consider investing initial profits back into your business by upping your marketing efforts. Now is the time to leverage the content and work on increasing traffic and search engine ranking.
Start a pay per click advertising campaign. This is one of the most effective ways to drive qualified traffic. Yes, it costs money, but the chances of it resulting in a heftier bottom line are extremely good.
Submit your site to appropriate directories. Some are free, but many of the most popular charge a monthly or annual fee. If you are interested in geo targeting your market, local directories are a great way to reach potential customers in specific locales.
What about your website? Does it need some sprucing up? This is a good time to update the content, and consider adding new forms of content such as video or audio. There can be quite a learning curve to creating an online video clip that looks professional so you may want to consider hiring an expert rather than buying software to do it yourself. A professional video company can also hire actors and pay for the rights to popular music clips to include as accompaniments.
Ongoing Efforts
The bigger your Online Business gets, the less time you will have for performing marketing tasks. You may want to hire a virtual assistant to take over some of those more menial jobs like bookkeeping or adding inventory to your merchant software.
If you are the type of person who likes more control over the business operations, consider obtaining training in those areas that are not your forte. Take an online internet marketing education class or enrol in courses at your local college or university. Increasing your knowledge is never a waste of money.
As your marketing needs change, so should your software. You might need to upgrade to the latest version, or purchase new programs to help you advertise more effectively.
The key to success with an Online Business is to start slowly, then reinvest profits on a regular basis so that it can grow. Reinvesting in your crops from the first harvests is definitely wise to do.
Consider splitting the first profits between rewarding yourself for all your hard work and investing in something that either makes your job easier or increases your marketing reach.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2012
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Champion article Sean. Unfortunately I am still in the sand box I think. After building so much content nearly 300 pages and building links on a regular basis, I am still not seeing much return in the way of rankings. Hopefully I will be out soon and Google recognizes all the work I have done and shoots me to the top. Fingers crossed. Reinvesting is a must initially….it will make life easier in the end and increase those profits.
Hi Bill,
One way you can check if you are in the sandbox or not, is to simply enter your entire url into the Google search box (like this – site:yoururl.com) and see what search results are returned. If you are listed in the results, you should see all of the pages that have been indexed.
The other thing you can do just to make sure, is to copy a phrase (maybe 15 words or so) from one of your posts and enter it into a google search…make sure you wrap quotes around the phrase (like this – “your phrase here”). If your site comes up in the search, you are definitely not sandboxed.
Hope this helps.
Regards – Sean
Bill,
I believe that all your hard work and effort will pay off very soon. Google is sometimes very funny in the way that they operate. However, if you have implemented the basics the return will be great.
I am still using a free blog and cannot wait to be in a position to launch my own website.
Thanks Cemil. Hopefully it will pay off soon…it’s just a matter of time before it happens I think. Good luck with your blog and launching your site in the future. I wish you well.
Thanks for that info Sean. Great help. By the looks of things I am definitely not in the sandbox. Do you think it’s just coming down to the age of my domain name and the high competition of my keywords. The domain has been live since December 08. I cant think of any other reason why I am being held back.
Hi Bill,
If you are not in the sandbox, and you are not achieving high rankings…you may need to take a look at your SEO strategies, or the keywords you are targeting. If you are targeting keywords that have competition from millions of pages, it is going to take a long time to achieve page one rankings. If this is the case, you might like to do some keyword research on more long-tail keywords for easier ranking.
PS: There is nothing wrong with targeting high competition keywords, as long as you are prepared to work on them over the long haul
Regards – Sean
Thanks Sean you have been a great help on this topic. Much appreciate your insight.
Thanks, Bill T
Sean
When I enter my site as suggested I get 4 results, yet in MS it says I have many pages indexed.
Any reason why this would be so?
Wow, what an exciting period of online business to be in – the growth stage! Hiring people to do grunt work… Ah…. Dream come true for a newbie
Hi Sean,
I’ve kept my investing in my online business to a minimum so far. I feel like it’s best to keep my expenses low and when I start making a profit I will start investing in my business.
I’m with Lina. I can’t wait until I’m making some serious profits and I can outsource the things I don’t really enjoy doing. Still, I think it’s important to be able to do them effectively even if I don’t like doing them. That way when I go to pay for these services I’ll know what to expect.