Whether you are prospecting for leads to build your home based business, or selling a product or service, online marketing is your best chance to reach the maximum number of prospects for whatever you are selling.
Also called Internet marketing, online marketing is a constantly evolving art and science, and it’s important to understand what successful marketers are doing and strive to stay up to date with what’s working.
There are fundamentals that are “evergreen” in the sense that they apply now and will for the foreseeable future.
Here are five classic, proven, evergreen ways to help ensure that you get the most from your online sales efforts.
1) Collect Email Addresses – be sure to have a signup form on your site and encourage people to opt in your list. Encourage them to do this by offering valuable free information that will make it worth their time to give you their contact details. Later, you can use this to send out special offers, follow-ups, whatever you like. Aweber is a premier provider of mailing list and autoresponder services, and has a wealth of information for you.
2) Maintain a Professional Site – many online marketers jam their sites with so much “stuff” that it encourages visitors to leave rather than stick around to learn more. Some examples of things that turn many people away include:
- music or video that plays automatically when the visitor lands and is difficult or impossible to stop
- lots of animated, flashing graphics all over
- ads not only on the sidebars but also embedded throughout the content (my personal pet peeve)
Keep your site clean and attractive – it is the first impression most of your visitors get of you. You don’t want your website or blog to look like a junkyard.
3) Track Your Visitors – use a service like Google Analytics to track your site stats. This will give you very valuable information about where your visitors come from, how long they stay, and what they do on your site. You can track the effectiveness of your content and online marketing efforts this way. If you are already using Google Analytics, here are some basic tips for understanding Google Analytics reports.
4) Be Easy to Contact – make sure your contact information is easy to find, and make it a point to respond as quickly as possible when someone sends you a message or calls. While few people expect you to reply to email inquiries within minutes, answer as soon as you can. The worst thing you can do is ignore inquiries or wait 2-3 days to respond. By that time, many of your potential leads or customers will have given up and gone elsewhere.
5) Watch Your Competition – regardless of whether you are marketing a home business opportunity, or selling a product or service, you have a lot of competition out there. Your top competitors are working to stay on the ball and keep up to date on the latest online marketing techniques, and you need to as well.
Find forums and discussion groups related to your niche, and hang out to hear what your potential customers and leads are talking about. Write articles, blog, or make videos about solutions to problems they discuss, and become a member of the community and establish a reputation for being a contributor. If you aren’t doing this, you can bet that your friendly competitors are.
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Eldon,
These are all very sound ways to boost your online marketing efforts. Collecting emails is a crucial tactic to building success online. It’s so important that I even created an email resource guide to help people excel at email marketing.
Thanks for the tips!
You’re welcome Dewane.
Hi Eldon,
You have explained the essential details of marketing online very well. Working on line it like a big jig saw puzzle and it is having the essential basic skills to develop a long term strong business.
Many thanks for your advice .
Rosemary
Hi Rosemary, thanks for stopping by, I appreciate your comments!