Follow These Steps for Successful Online Marketing
Follow these three steps to improve your chances of marketing online.
Get Enough Traffic to Your Website
Traffic is the term to describe people coming to your website. A lack of traffic is an issue for brick and mortar stores and digital stores alike.
The difference for your website or online business is that it’s much easier to get people to visit your website by using paid ads.
How Many People Should I Expect To Visit My Site?
The number of people you can expect to visit your site will be based on many factors like:
Your industry is going to have a lot of influence on how many people are searching for your product or service. A student who is looking for a digital tutor is very likely to find multiple options for help online. Whereas, a business looking for a quote for industrial materials will likely have a more difficult time.
The student looking for a tutor will be among a large number of other students looking for the same service. There will also be professionals who want to improve their resumes, businesses looking to expand internationally among others who may benefit from hiring a digital tutor. If you happened to be a tutor you would simply need to make sure your website had good content on it and was optimized to show up in Search Engines and you’re likely to have success.
If you have a complicated product or service it’s less likely that people will search for help online. They may begin the buying process by collecting information, but if they know that they’ll need a quote or to speak with a representative to take the next step it’s more often that people will just call a business directly than do an extensive online search.
To figure out how much traffic your website could get begin by building a list of keywords. Your keywords are words and terms that are used to describe your business, product or service.
For instance, a digital tutor may have keywords that include: online tutoring, virtual tutor, digital teaching and more.
There are multiple free tools out to help you build your keyword list. Some free keyword tools include:
Looking at the screenshot above you can see that the term digital tutor has 314 different words or search terms that are relevant to “digital tutor”. Each term has it’s own search volume which tells how many searches are available on a monthly basis for that term.
It’s important to note that you’ll want to distinguish between local and national results. While a term may have a very high search volume, if your product or solution is local then it may not be as valuable.
Further, it’s good to review the keyword competition. A term like “ab tutor” has a competition ranking of .06 making it easier to rank for. However, you’ll have to be aware that terms like this also have ads shown during the query which some advertisers are paying up to $12.83 per click for.
To find out how much traffic your website can get, begin by building a keyword list of relevant keywords and then total all of the monthly traffic available. This is a starting point for organic traffic to your site.
Organic traffic is great because it gives you the ability to build a stronger website with content your customers will appreciate. The downside is that it takes a lot of work and time to see results using this technique.
Many people will supplement their work or jump ahead by running paid ads.
Paid ads can be very powerful because they allow you to put your brand, offer or message in front of someone who is more likely to click.
This offering is much different as most people distrust ads and will skip them completely. However, people who click ads often have a higher buying intent and therefore are more valuable.
If you would like to use paid ads for your traffic, you’ll have to consider how much traffic is available for relevant keywords. To answer this question, you’ll want to go back to your keywords list.
With your list in hand now you can begin to review the “Cost Per Click” or CPC of ads for your relevant keywords.
Tools like Ispionage are great resources to help with this. In Ispionage you can do Pay Per Click (PPC) research for your industry and your competitors.
Ispionage can help you identify competitors, their monthly budgets and even their ads! Using this information, you can begin to form an idea of how much you could be spending and the specific ads that work.
By understanding how much it costs to get traffic to your website you can begin to determine how much that traffic needs to be worth to make it productive for your business. This brings us to the second way to succeed with online marketing.
Convert Website Visitors
Most businesses make the mistake of using their website as a digital brochure to list their contact information, staff and a bit about what they do.
To have a successful website for your business you’ll need to convert visitors into leads and customers. This begins by simply learning your visitors contact information and getting their permission to speak further.
Focus on collecting contact information
A very successful tactic to collect website visitors’ information is to exchange a bribe:
By providing value up front you will gain trust and favor-ability in the eyes of your prospect. With more information about the solution your business offers or product your prospect can become better educated.
This helps improve your positioning in their eyes and gives you the ability to communicate with them further.
Define a path to customers giving you their credit card
Once you have website visitors that have become prospects it’s time to put them on a path to become a customer. While many people feel sleezy about sales, the truth is that people wouldn’t be visiting your site to look for a solution if they weren’t interested in a solution.
It’s your business’ responsibility to your customers to make them an offer to help alleviate their problems and frustrations.
An easy step to do after you have someone’s contact information is to put them into an email campaign that moves them closer to where they want to be. This could be a series of emails with more education or simply inviting them to check out other products you have.
Another good tactic is to add the contact information into a website remarketing list. This will allow you to show them an offer or future message on Google or Facebook. It’s great to have a website remarketing list for future products or special offers. It will also put pressure on you to communicate with them further.
Stay Consistent
Your commitment to digital marketing over a long period of time will improve your results. Many marketing gurus would like you to believe that you can earn millions overnight by simply buying their courses.
The truth is that marketing is a continual process built from a series of experiments. You have to get comfortable failing if you want to have success in digital marketing. The speed of change and innovation require continual development and experimentation.
Stay learning
Digital marketing can be frustrating because of the learning curve involved with the technology to market online. Different tools each have their own learning curves which can take time to become proficient in.
One of the best things you can do is to get functionally competent in a platform and then commit to learning more in the future. This is easier to do with a schedule like a weekly content calendar, hosting a recurring webinar or something similar. The pressure to perform combined with the recurring use of the tool will make you more comfortable and competent.
Get coaching and help
Would you ever begin competing for the Olympics without a coach? Of course not, right?! You’d want to have every advantage available to improve your odds of success.
Granted, digital marketing isn’t as tough (or glorious) as the Olympics, but it’s a long term commitment to taking repeated action.
You can avoid the sense of failure and early frustrations by hiring a coach. Your coach could be a digital marketing agency, a consultant or freelancer. Whichever choice is best for you, ensure that you have clearly defined milestones for using the tools or getting results.
Keep focused on your long-term goal
It’s easy to get distracted by new technologies or opportunities. However, your long-term goal to using and becoming better at digital marketing should remain a focus for growing your business online.
You may consider starting off with a commitment to publish one blog a week for twenty six weeks. As you get more comfortable you can add video. A few months in you could add audio and start doing link building.
You’ll find that the longer you commit to putting in the work, the more momentum you’ll carry. At a certain point the momentum will become greater than you can handle on your own.
I like the analogy of a freight train: it takes a ton of time and energy to get it started, but once it’s moving it’s nearly impossible to stop.
Here’s to hoping for your future success with marketing your business online. If you have questions or want help feel free to drop us a line.
