By Donna Knight
The disadvantage of an offline business compared to an online business is the limited marketplace. There are multiple factors that need to be perfect to guarantee your business success. One factor is the limited geographic area that will be the potential audience for your goods or services. Another factor is the limited number of places to advertise. In addition, to give your products or service the exposure they need usually requires a sizeable financial investment.
In the past decade, all this has changed. On the internet, the whole world can be your market. Marketing and promotion can be done at the speed of electrons at little or no cost. All this has changed with the advent of the Internet. When you do pay to advertise, your advertising dollars can stretch a lot further with online marketing
It’s no secret that the Internet has become a breeding place for unknown millionaires. These are the people who have established new online businesses that became wildly successful empires. Despite their success, you won’t see them on T.V., doing the rounds on The Tonight Show or David Letterman. These entrepreneurs are perfectly happy to keep their success to themselves while enjoying a life of abundance beyond their wildest dreams.
If you have an offline business, right now you may be thinking, “that’s good for them but how will it benefit me?†The good news is that the internet can provide the same benefits for offline businesses. In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll position yourself on the internet now before your competition does and leaves you eating their dust.
Here are some things you need to know to start marketing your offline business online:
1. You need a website. A website will be like an online version of your shop where you can display your products or announce your services. You can also choose to perform transactions or make sales on your website. You can accept orders and pre-orders by using forms and online payment processors.
2. You need a secure payment method to accept payments online. 63% of consumers worldwide are still hesitant to use their credit card or checks online. Your payment pages can be secure by using Secure Sockets Layers (SSL), which protects data transmissions over the web by encrypting or encoding the data so that it can’t be read if intercepted by a hacker.
3. You also need to learn how to drive traffic to your site. This is not that difficult though. Traffic refers to the number of people who visit your website. The more people who see your site, the more exposure your products or services receive. Therefore, making more sales may require getting more people to come to your site. Making sales is always a numbers game, both online and offline. Here are some proven ways to increase traffic to your site:
A. Optimize your site for the search engines. A good 80% of traffic comes from search engines queries. If your website gets a high position in the search engine results, you will get more visitors. Search engine optimization tactics include keyword research and integration, content creation, and submission of your site to as many high-traffic search engines as possible.
B. Exchange links with other similar but non-competing sites, but also try to get one-way links to your site. One-way links are links where they link to you, but you don’t link back. Search engines frown on obviously intentional reciprocal linking. If you get links from completely unrelated sites, these may be poor quality links.
C. Advertise on other sites by using banners.
D. Try pay-per-click advertising, such as Overture or Google AdWords.
4. You also have to establish a way to keep past visitors. This can be done using a good autoresponder service or by regularly sending out an Ezine. Ezines are electronic newsletters that provide valuable information for your subscribers. By offering them something worth their time, you will gain trust, which could result in future sales.
5. Consider viral marketing, which is the online equivalent of word of mouth advertising. Here’s how it works: distribute a useful and desirable product for free. This is usually in the form of an eBook or a special report on a subject of interest and importance to your target market. Add links to your product or website to this Ebook. Allow your readers to freely distribute it to their friends and family by giving them giveaway rights. An advanced technique is to give them resale rights to this viral product, allowing them to keep 100% of the profits for any sales. This would guarantee an exponential spread of the viral product, resulting in a similar exponential growth of your site’s traffic.
These days putting your offline business online is so cheap, that you have nothing to lose by trying it. You don’t need a major investment, and the risks are usually negligible. The key is to start now, and you will find that there are endless possibilities for your business online.
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Donna Knight is a Computer Trainer and Website Promotion Specialist. She has built over 200 websites and helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time when marketing online, visit her Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com
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Copyright (C) 2005 Donna Knight. All Rights Reserved. Permission granted to post this article in newsletters, free ebooks or websites as long as the article and resource box remain intact.
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