If you’re new to the Internet, promoting your goods and services on the Internet may seem mysterious. The good news is that it’s not all that difficult—people all over the world do it all day, every day, and you can, too. All you need is a little preparation, a plan and some infrastructure, and you’re good to go.
Preparation
This is the hardest part: you have to find some thing or service that people want. People buy everything and anything over the Internet. You just have to pick one or two that you happen to be good at and passionate about.
If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance you’ve already done this part—which is GREAT because that’s the one part of marketing on the Web that I can’t help you with.
The Plan
Once you know what you’re going to sell on the Internet, you need to come up with a plan for how you’re going to sell it. The most basic part of this is to get a website. But—and most people skip this—you also have to think about how you’re going to use the website and what role it will play in the sales process.
As you’re going through this, remember that you have a lot of competition. Someone will always be cheaper than you, someone will often be better than you and you’re not going to be the right fit for every visitor. Although you may want to serve everyone, you’re more likely to be successful if you pick a niche and go with it. That said, let’s get on with it.
Step one: decide on a goal for your website. For example, is the website going to spark a sale or a conversation? Or is your goal to spark a conversation that leads to a sale? Whatever it is, decide on it up front. The more clearly you structure your site around this goal, the more likely you are to be successful.
Step two: pick two or three ways to drive traffic to your site. The best way is to build a better mouse trap—the world will beat a path to your door. But even that takes some initial work to let everyone know. Some common ways are pay per click advertising (Google and Overture have good programs), news releases (PR Web is a good resource) and offline advertising. You probably cannot count on organic search engine placement being a useful visitor source until you’ve been around for a while.
Step three: once a user is on your site, you have roughly 10 seconds to get them interested. What do you want them to know about you in those 10 seconds? What’s the call to action you’re going to have for the people who are interested? You might have them register, you might encourage them to bookmark your site or you might tell them to call you. This is the first goal you have to pick. If you’re new to selling on the Internet, and you’re selling an abstract value, you probably want to have people contact you. If you’re selling a physical good at a modest price, you can count on completing the sale online.
Step four: very few of the visitors who come by your site will take that action step on their first visit, so you need to have a reason for them to come back. Give them something of value that first visit and they’re more likely to return, especially if there’s a promise of getting something more on their next visit. If you have their email address, an email newsletter is a great way to get them to come back. You should also consider an RSS feed. RSS feeds help them keep informed about your site without their having to give you their email address. And whether they read or not is totally up to them, so you need to make it worth their while.
Step five: refactor and repeat. Although the formula for online marketing is pretty similar for a wide variety of businesses, the details vary greatly from one to the next. No matter how much planning you do up front, you’ll find something you want to change. That’s OK—that’s the name of the game. When you find something that works, tweak your site to emphasize it. When something bombs, get rid of it.
The Infrastructure
Now that you’ve picked what you’re going to sell and you’ve got a plan for how your website is going to work its magic, you need some infrastructure to tie it altogether.
Let’s start with the basics. You need a domain name. You shouldn’t pay more than $10 per year for a domain name unless you have a solid reason why. Also, you should keep all your domains in the same place. Managing your domains gets a bit hectic when you have them scattered all over the place. Then you need hosting—a place to store your files and to operate any scripts. You’ll need to pay $150-$200 per year (you can pay more, you can pay less—these are approximate figures). You might need an SSL certificate to go with that.
If you’re selling goods, you’ll probably want a shopping cart. There are lots of perfectly good shopping carts available, many for free. You should choose your shopping cart based on any special requirements you might have. For example, maybe you want to show multiple images per item. Or maybe you have special shipping calculation requirements. Most scripts do the basics pretty well so its these outlier requirements that need to drive your decision.
No matter what you’re selling, you’ll need a script that you can use to add content to the site on a regular basis. Right now, this usually means a blog, or weblog. Blog software, also often available for free, allows you to add fresh content to your site without having to involve a website maintenance professional. Blog content is a great way to improve your organic search engine results as well—blog entries are plain text, freshly updated, and so many search engines replace results relatively high.
In Summary
Selling on the Internet is no longer a mysterious process. If you do the right preparation, and you have a plan for how to work your properly outfitted website, you’ll be on the road to success.
If you have questions about your particular need, please drop me a note at reid@fastwebupdates.com or leave a comment below.