What's the best way to market on the Internet?

[dvcmaster]

Hi everyone,

I like doing HTML and am not too bad on programming in general. I want to try and branch out a bit and start my own thing going, web site and all, but don't quite know how to do it.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks.

[compar]

The problem with your poll is that there isn't one answer. To market on the Internet requires a variety of techniques. You don't even have them all covered by the options in your polling question.

I'm sure John Scott will be here in a minute and tell you the answer is "none of the above" and what you have to practice is branding.

The problem with using a poll as part of this question is that that assumes you know all the possible answers. And that the answer can be a single item. It is obvious you don't and it isn't.

[dvcmaster]

I appreciate your honest comments and have taken them on board. I gave the options above and to be honest, I do not know the best way to market on the Internet. I also placed 'Other' there so people could place their own opinions on what they thought if they choose other, or just place their own opinions: which I see you have done.

I simply put this poll up for people to get a general idea of what everybody elses ideas were on how to market online, not to try and find out a right or wrong way of doing things.

[spidersam]

Pay per click has been best for me....most focused traffic. That's all I really want.

[dvcmaster]

So what type of business are you promoting and what success did you get out of pay per click with it?

[spidersam]

It's a niche market, so people don't "stumble" upon it and buy. They are fairly expensive model boats.

[adam2003w]

I've been working on websites for about 5 years. Recently I've spent some time looking at marketing techniques and here is my advice.

Before you market your site using external services. Try optimizing your site your self for search engines and usability. A wonderful article on this is at Site Point called Old Skool Search Engine Success, Step-By-Step.

If you spend a little extra time honing your site, you can increase targetted trafic and visitors even before you start spending money out of your own pocket.

Not to knock external marketing efforts, just a little focus on internal marketing efforts some might not know about.

[John Scott]

Huh. Not agreeing with that article too much.

Beware! Never pick extremely popular keywords thinking that you'll gain a higher rank in a search engine. This is not how the system works; because they’re popular keywords, there’s more competition for them. You'll have better results in improving your rank if you find and choose less popular keywords. What represents a “good” keyword? I’d consider a good keyword to be one that was searched for approximately 1000 times or more in a given month.

Never pick popular keywords? So we should leave those for our competition?

Go to the search engine for which you’re optimizing your site, and perform a search on your main keywords (in the case of our imaginary site, we’d search on “quality Web hosting” and “Web hosting plan”).

Yeah, search for "quality web hosting". I'm number one.

Step 5: Add Content, Content, and More Content

That's just stupid.

It should read: "Add Links, Links, and More Links"

[greg]

i agree with the fact that there is no one way to market. The thing you will find is that with every industry there are different ways to market. Most have some combination of various methods, but each take a different approach.

For example, i am marketing for political camapigns and learning up on that quite extensively. The way to market for them is drastically different than say the last site i marketed, which was more of a webmaster related site.

Not to mention that people have different ways that they market. I can assure you i have a different style than John, John has a different style than Bob, and so on. It is much like web design were the people have different styles.

Not to mention different needs. Some sites it is just to get as many people as possible to view it, sort of the shotgun approach. However some sites can be able to market to a very narrow audience and draw in drastically fewer visitors, yet fare just as well because of higher return rates.

[adam2003w]

next time i think i find the holy grail of web advice articles, I think I'll post it on the forum to get the community deconstruction of it.

[John Scott]

I really don't think there is a holy grail, but this is close to it:

Get links, links, and more links.

That is, for SEO. But the success of a website depends on more factors than SEO. We all know this. Professional design, which is attractive and instills confidence. That's important. Having a convincing USP. That's important. ... Having a viable business model - that might be the most important.

...

[hourwealth24]

Too many answers. You need to use all the tools in a variety of ways to be successful!

Jeff Casmer
www.24hourwealth.com