Business Website Marketing

The State of Internet Marketing.

One of the best, and worst, things about Internet Marketing is the speed with which it changes. Google changes its search algorithm 500 to 600 times every year. That’s up to 1.64 changes a day! Just from Google. Add in Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the other sites around the globe and the speed of change in this industry can be bewildering. And there’s no sign that it’s going to slow down any time soon.

Where Your Business Stands Today

Today, everybody and their brother-in-law is online. Your business with one or more brick-and-mortar locations and all the rent, staff, insurance, inventory and other overhead that involves, competes with some guy in a home office selling products he doesn’t even warehouse himself. But he’s got a great website. He works on it every day to ensure he’s being found by the people searching for his products and services and he’s outselling you two-to-one because he has little overhead and can keep his prices ridiculously low.

The Competition is Greater

For every search, there are millions or billions of web pages out there. For example, I just typed “shoes” in Google and got back 1.65 BILLION results in 0.15 seconds. Not that anyone is going to look at 1.65 billion web pages. Most people don’t look past the first 10 on the first page. In reality, most people probably don’t look past the first 3-5 results before revising their search terms if they don’t find what they’re looking for right away.

Search Engines are Smarter

And the search engines keep getting smarter. Remember those 600 changes a year Google makes to its algorithm? There’s a reason for that. Google knows it has to deliver the most relevant results possible to its users if it’s going to remain the search standard it has become. It knows Bing (or some newcomer) would like nothing more than to knock it off its throne if it doesn’t return the best possible results. So it changes its algorithm 1.64 times a day to ensure that it indexes and returns the most relevant results every day. This can seem like a nightmare to Internet marketers who are trying to help their clients stay on top of the first page of results, but it’s all for the good of the searcher, and we’re all searchers.

The times, they are a’changing

Long gone are the days when you could just repeat your keywords of value 50 times on a page to be indexed highly by the search engine of the day. The search engines are much smarter today. Gone are the days when you could purchase links from link farms to make it appear that your website was more popular than it really is. Gone are the days when you could just put your website up and let it sit there on the shelf becoming as dusty as those old print catalogs on a shelf in your warehouse.

Get Involved in Content Marketing

The first thing to do to get started in content marketing is to get your website up and running. Content marketing is a great way to bring in new business to your new website, and a website built on a platform such as WordPress can help you to create and publish content on your own site with ease, which is usually the best starting point. Someone experienced in web design packages should be able to sort this out for you, and you can then go from there.

Top 3 Content Marketing Tactics for Your New Business Website

One of the most important marketing techniques for any business with a website is to create and market valuable content. The power of valuable content online is well known, and you may be keen to start up your own content marketing campaign. But where to start?

Someone who is skilled in web design packages will be able to create a website for your business which is built on a CMS and geared towards content creation. However, content marketing involves publishing content in other locations, and this article looks at three of the best ways to do this.

1. Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the most effective content marketing techniques around. Quick and easy to get started, it is also free (depending on who writes the content) and has long-lasting benefits.

After you’ve got a website up and running from a company offering web design packages, the idea is that you provide value to your potential customers using information articles that are likely to be of interest to them.

If you write a large number of quality articles over time then you will get your name in front of more potential customers and they will come to think of you as a valuable resource, making you a more attractive proposition when they are looking for the services or products that you offer.

Optimise your articles for the search engines and you will increase your visibility online so that more people can find their way back to your website where you can provide them with even more information. Articles also stay online as long as you want them to, so you could end up finding new customers through an article that you wrote years ago.

2. Info Products

A short information product like an ebook or white paper is an excellent way to enhance your reputation as an industry resource and win more customers. People love information, especially the type of information which is written by experts to solve a problem or provide a solution.

Use your expertise to solve a problem for your customers. It doesn’t have to be too long, just long enough to provide all of the information that you need to in a succinct and compelling format. If successful, you will see people share your info product across the internet where it will pick up its own momentum and drive more customers back to your website.

3. Press Releases

Web design packages built on a CMS are great for producing content on your site, but if you want to market content elsewhere online then press releases can be very effective. By creating interesting releases on the latest industry topics and events you can easily find your press release attracting exactly the people who you want to find you.

When you optimise your releases for the search engines, people will come across them at the exact moment that they are searching for related information, and you can drive more people back to your website who would otherwise remain unaware of your business.

Press releases also have the benefit of showing that you know about the industry and that you are an authority who can be trusted, and you also stand the chance of seeing your release get picked up by other media which can increase your exposure enormously.

Marcus Miller is a website designer and internet marketing expert with more than ten years experience building and promoting websites.

Marcus’s current venture is Web Design & SEO Packages – a new way of buying and promoting a website for your business at an affordable, fixed price.