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Internet Marketing for 2010
Since the pioneering days of the Internet, marketing online has always been a reality, but that reality has drastically changed in the last few years. Marketing online for the year 2010 has its own unique challenges.
Check out these following online marketing statistics:
• 70% of customers start their product and service research online.
• Local businesses receive over one billion searches per month.
• Of those local business searches, 82% are first contacts.
• 16% of online inquires turn into purchases at the real life stores, and this number is expected to increase to 50% by the end of 2010.
• Every dollar spent online, almost four dollars gets spent in the actual, physical real life stores.
Many Internet marketing companies center on SEO technologies and creating websites that pander to search engines instead of real life people. These companies are really missing the boat.
The days are long gone when a business publishes a web site and hopes that it will attract customers to an online purchase, but online competition is tough. All those websites are all in competition with each other for all of the same visitors, and, more importantly, the same customers. For example, search for “pizza,” and Google shoots back 26,500,000 web sites and Yahoo! Lists 531,000,000 sites. In 2010 and beyond the concept has evolved into a social media networking phenomena with such sites as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube Channels, and Twitter. Pizza Hut has even hired a person dedicated to marketing on Twitter.
And whether or not your online marketing is effective is based upon the number of customers the marketing is driving to the actual real life store location. Online searches have become local as opposed to global.
All of this is not to say to completely stay away from SEO techniques. The basics still apply:
Submit your website to all the regular search engines. You can do this for free, and although this doesn’t guarantee that your site will reach top ranking, it does let the search engines know you’re out there on the web.
Use content words.
Content words do help search engines find your site; however, use too many content words the search engines will just think you are spamming them.
Find critical links.
The more legitimate links on your website, not only the higher ranking you’ll receive in the search engines, but the more legitimate your own potential customers are going to consider you to be.
Keep your online marketing updated.
At least monthly, update your site with new and current content and fresh links. Send out regular email newsletters and tweets.
Improve your traffic.
This step seems pretty basic, but it involves a bit of old fashioned legwork and promotion the old fashioned way—business cards, brochures, talking and networking with everybody you know.
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