Your Goals

What do you want your website to accomplish? You may want visitors to buy products or services directly from your website, or you may only want to provide more information about your brick-and-mortar company and give your customers a place to learn about sales, special offers, business hours, and other information. Your first step is to determine your goals for your website, and plan to design it accordingly.

Research: Plan to spend a lot of time researching information, both for your company and about your competitors. The more you know about the competition, the better equipped you will be to offer something unique. Internet users typically make Internet purchases for one of the following reasons:

• They recognize the name (branding)
• The process is convenient and the deal is better than other companies offering the same product or service
• They can’t get the particular product or service elsewhere

If you can offer something unique and original, even a new spin on an old product or service, you can succeed online. With good advertising practices, you can also be successful with not-so-unusual products by increasing your visibility and offering better deals than your competitors.

Web Marketing Basics

Your first steps in starting your Internet marketing campaign sound simple, but will require an investment of your time:

• Decide what you want your campaign to accomplish
• Establish a budget
• Formulate a game plan

These steps conform with the basic but critical “secret” to Internet success. Remember, strategy is key. You are headed into unfamiliar territory, and without a map, you’ll probably get lost!

Why Internet Marketing

Many people still have the impression that Internet marketing is just for people who have e-books or other electronic products, or for those who have a lot of technical know-how. However, the World Wide Web has changed the way we do business, and these days websites and online sales are for everyone—even you!

No matter what type of business you are involved in or thinking about starting, there is a place on the Internet for you. E-commerce, which is a fancy term for online selling, has enabled companies large and small to reach a bigger customer base than ever before.

Everyone is online these days…

There are literally billions of people who use the Internet every day, and buying goods or services online is no longer intimidating or threatening. In fact, many people prefer to shop on the Internet for everything from books and videos to big-ticket items like cars, boats, and real estate. You can even buy groceries online and have them delivered to your house. Now that’s convenience!

There are two main categories of Internet marketing: strictly online businesses, and expansion of traditional brick-and-mortar (offline) companies. Offline businesses are companies like Coca-Cola, Reebok, Neiman-Marcus, and Honda: businesses that exist in the “real world” and use Internet marketing to reach more potential customers as well as give their existing customers access to information about their companies. Business websites for offline companies also offer a chance to interact and offer feedback on products or services that worldwide customers would not otherwise have.

Online businesses include giants like Amazon and eBay—they are companies that don’t have physical store locations, but sell goods and services online. Companies based on e-book sales or various Internet services are typically online businesses, as they have no need for a physical store.

Regardless of the type of business you’re running or planning to run, the Internet is a powerful marketing tool. Everyone uses the Internet for business today, and if you aren’t online, you are missing out on potential customers. Go ahead—come up with the most obscure type of business you can think of and enter it in your favorite search engine. You’ll be amazed at the number of results you get.

Your website doesn’t have to be just a sales tool. In fact, it should be more than that, regardless of whether you plan to sell through it. The most successful websites are informative and interesting to visit, providing information about your business whether or not you actually offer online purchases.

How do you know what belongs on your business website? The type of company you run, along with your personal business goals, will dictate the style and function of your online presence.

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