So, you're a small business, you've set up a website and you've added a blog. Now what?
Do you have an internet marketing plan? Have you thought of what online strategies you will use to be successful? As with large businesses, internet marketing strategies for small businesses should start with identifying your online goals.
Hopefully you have already considered and written down these online goals, but if you haven't done so already, you should ask yourself "Why do I have or need a website?" and "What do I want it to do for my business?" The answers to these and other specific questions should help you develop specific internet marketing strategies designed to achieve these goals.
First, your desired audience needs to find your website, then they need to have a satisfying experience, and ultimately they need to engage with your website as you have intended for them to do. This is where specific website goals come into play.
Getting Visitors To Your Website in the First Place
In order to enable visitors to find you, you need to come up high in the search engine results for your chosen keyword phrases. Does your site show up in the top half of the first page of a search? Many factors must work together in order to achieving a high search position - here is a good resource for learning what it takes: http://searchengineland.com/seotable.
Giving Website Visitors What they Want
For visitors to have a satisfying experience on your site, they need to easily find what THEY are looking for. Are they leaving your website right away because it wasn't what they expected, or are they sticking around to get what they need?
Getting What You Want - Achieving Your Online Marketing Goals
In order for visitors to engage with your website as YOU have intended, you have to effectively guide them towards these goals. Is your website structured so that they can quickly find what they are looking for? Is your content engaging and accessible so that if it is information they are looking for, they will find it and read it before they leave the site?
As a result of visiting your website, are people emailing you more, contacting you more, calling you more, making more reservations, hiring you? How do you know?
Measuring How You Are Doing and Reacting to the Results
You can measure how your website is doing in all of these areas with the help of website analytics programs such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, and you can adjust your internet marketing strategies and tactics accordingly.
Using an internet marketing plan is an ongoing process, and identifying website goals, developing a plan, optimizing a site appropriately, measuring the results, and reacting accordingly all help in developing more effective internet marketing strategies for small businesses like yours.
By Rich Pearce, Yahoo! Contributor Network
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