Ode to Web Design and Email Marketing

The most appealing aspect of internet marketing is that you can take an idea that you have and experiment with it without spending a great deal of money.If you want to set up a traditional business you have the initial expense of premises, rent, heating, inventory and staff.You then may have to work long hours to ensure that your business is successful.If the business does not work out, what then? With Internet marketing you have no overheads, you are open for business 24 hours a day and you can respond to changing trends very quickly.You can adapt your strategy or go in a completely different direction if you want.The one thing that all businesses have in common whether it is online or offline is that they need customers.An offline business would want to have their premises somewhere where there are a lot of potential customers and not hide down a back alley where no-one can find them.An online business is the same.But instead of physical brick-and-mortar premises they have a Website, and that website needs to be found to ensure that the business can operate.Search engine optimisation is vital in this case.You may have the best website in the world, but if no one knows where you are then it is completely useless.Search engine optimisation, when done properly, is the equivalent of positioning your shop or premises in the prime spot on Main St, only in this case you The basic premise of Social Media Marketing is that you post your content to a social network and hope that it is picked up by others who then recommend it to their friends or followers resulting in an avalanche of visitors to your site and lots of links back to your site which gives a huge boost to your search engine rankings.Amongst the most popular social media sites are networks such as Facebook, and content sites such as YouTube, Digg and Twitter.Posting a video to YouTube can be a goldmine if it goes viral and quickly spreads all over the web.Email Marketing is one of the most intimate and effective ways of reaching your customers.When you obtain an email address from someone it can keep on paying you for years to come.Most small businesses do not understand how effective email marketing can be.Just imagine if someone is browsing around a shop and when leaving they hand a card to the owner with all their details on it and ask to be contacted with any updates.This is precisely what email marketing can do.When people visit your site and are encouraged to give you their email address they are effectively giving you permission to contact them whenever you want.Any further information you send to them costs nothing at all.Compare that to a direct mail campaign.You can use the email to inform them of special offers, new promotions or any products that you care to recommend to them.The message you send is entirely up to you.An auto-responder service takes care of all sign ups and all delivery of your message.Web Design plays a very important part of your business as you need to use your site to build your business.When the visitor comes to your site you do not just want them to comment on how lovely your site is, you want it to an effective sales tool.Being able to navigate their way around the site is important.The layout of the site does not need to be overcomplicated but rather needs to be user-friendly.If you want the visitor to buy from the site you must make it easy for them to do so.Leaving a site is very easy to do if they get frustrated by too many instructions.If you want to capture their email address (and you definitely should), make sure that you have something to offer in return.Web Design is a skill that takes account of the visitor experience and is not designed to show how clever the developer is.Subtle use of colour and font size can make a huge difference on whether someone stays on your site or leaves immediately.The placement of adverts is also something that a web designer can do to gain maximum benefit from each visitor.r shop is a website.For example, if you specialise in selling Ford car parts, you want your website to feature highly in the Search engines results for Ford car parts.People looking for Honda car parts are of no interest to you.Search engine marketing is therefore very important to your business.Search Engine Marketing enables you to pick as many keywords as you like and be featured highly in the search engines for each one provided you have the resources to go after all of them.There is very little expense involved in the set-up and once you have your website optimised properly you can reap the benefits for a long time.Search engine marketing allows you to target the exact customers that you want without wasting time and money on others.The traditional methods of marketing such as billboards, newspapers, etc.are like the equivalent of buckshot whereas search engine marketing gives you a laser guided approach to getting the attention of the customers that you want.Internet marketing is the direction that all companies are going and search engine optimisation as well as search engine marketing are vital components of this.The speed of change on the internet means that you have to be able to adapt and unlike brick and mortar businesses you can do this very inexpensively on the web.You can also diversify or go into a completely different market if you so choose without spending a lot of money at the outset.