Internet Marketing Resources

In the article below, you will find recommendations for sources of information and tools for web marketing.
A good database to use for keyword research is Wordtracker .

I hope the article below and the resources above prove very helpful to you. I spent a great deal of time and agonizing effort trying to find out the best way to promote a web site. There are a multitude of opinions on this subject. I didn't get anywhere with confidence until a began reading Brent Winters' and his associates' articles published at First Place Software. If one is new to a subject, then one doesn't possess the wisdom at the outset to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. I found Brent Winters' approach to be aggressive and yet reasonable and safe all at the same time. Unfortunately, Brent Winters has retired and the game of search engine optimization has changed dramatically.

If you have a web site or are planning one, you have started a game. You might as well play it to win. I didn't know how to do this until I finally decided to find an opinion leader and follow his advice. I picked Brent Winters for my opinion leader in this area. I have found that that was a very good choice.

The article below is a brief outline of what I have learned.

Streamlined Internet Marketing Strategy

by John Walt Childers, IPC-CID

To get a business venture promoted online can require very little capital investment at the outset, providing that a persistent and knowledgeable approach to internet marketing is followed and a good percentage of revenues are reinvested to improve market penetration and service. How much money is invested depends a lot on the extent to which you hire the aid of others versus how much you do yourself.

If you have plenty of capital to invest, you can play a bigger game faster. The following internet marketing strategy scales very nicely: It is a springboard that works equally well for the lone-wolf entrepreneur as for the corporate venturer, providing it is followed in sequence. The danger of deep pockets is that you can waste an awlful lot of cash in a hurry if you throw it in the wrong direction. The do-it-yourself pay-as-you-go entrerpreneur can afford to make a few mistakes, as long as he doesn't abandon his current income producing installation to do so. The corporate venturer needs to see his success take form without a lot of trips up blind alleys.

Let's start by assuming you are in business, or going into business, to make money. Along with other higher purposes, of course. If you are interested in publishing a web site only for the common good, you could insert the word "goodwill" for "money" in that statement. Fine. You will still want to use an internet marketing strategy that will get people who are looking for what you have to come to your web site in droves. Web site promotion, while very inexpensive at the outset, will cost some money. But you might also be surprised at how far goodwill will take you in web site marketing.

T he following are the major steps you can use in an Internet marketing strategy for a start-up business (and these can be applied with little modification to an existing online business):

Step 1. Basic grass-roots marketing.

This step is independent of "web site marketing."

Find out who you are and what business you are in. What do you produce? Write this up.

This first step is prior to any web site optimization and promotion. This may take awhile and you won't find the answers at this internet strategy page, because the answers are in you and the people you talk to. Perhaps we can help here in the area of which questions to ask. In completing this first step, you may at times want to relate your considerations to web site marketing using step 2 . Also, don't rush out and register a new domain name until you've completed steps 1 and 2.

Again, what do you produce? You may not have decided this yet, in which case it is time for some market research. Survey people via direct communication with those who could become your customers or clients and couple this with some soul searching of yourself. You'll be asking people what it is they need and want which you could produce. If you need help with surveying people contact On Target Research

Let's start with the soul searching stage. You'll be asking yourself the question "What do you want to produce?" You can qualify this question in any number of ways, but that is the basic question. The question is not "What do you want to be?" You will get to that question later, after you know what you most want to produce which is a valuable, exchangeable product.

Once you know what you produce, or will produce, write this up.


What actions do you take or will you take to produce these products? Write these down, at least the major categories of action.

Who are you? That is, what is your identity as it relates to what you do and what you produce? There may even be a term or label for who you are. Write this up. A person doing "soul searching" has now come to the question "What do I want to be?" This could be rephrased as "What beingness will I assume which is best suited to doing the actions needed in order to produce in volume the products I want?"

Now that you have answered questions about yourself and your business, ask these same questions about your prospective customers or clients, which we will refer to as your public or publics. The plural implies that there wil be more than one category of people who are prospects. You can cycle through these two viewpoints as often as needed: What your prospects want and what you want to produce. Survey more publics as necessary and write up what you find.

From your research you will find out who your publics are. These publics will be the people you promote to and ultimately sell to. Example: If you sell janitorial products, you are likely to find that one of your publics is janitors, and perhaps that another public would not be purchasing agents. You might find that the janitors decide what cleaning agents to use and get the purchasing agents to buy them.

All that done, you now have raw data from which you can begin your marketing strategy.


Now if you didn't or won't do this step, if it is just too much to confront, if you want to just jump into internet marketing and skip all the preliminary research, then you are going to wind up wasting a lot of time, effort and money.

Step 2. Keyword research.

Keywords are the search phrases people use when using a search engine to find something. Research has shown that when people are using the Internet to search for something specific, they use search engines like Google or directories like Yahoo. Thus, if people are looking for products you produce and find your web site, these people are qualified prospects . For this reason, good representation in search engines and directories is much more important than direct advertising, such as banner ads, magazine ads and radio.

a. Find out what keywords your public

is using to establish contact through search engines with organizations or businesses like yours. If you have done surveys in step 1, you probably already have the preliminary answers. If not, do those surveys or hire someone to do them. Omitting the surveys will cost you time, money and effort on ineffective web site marketing.

b. Find out which of those keywords are actually used in large numbers and have little competition,

that is, can be used in web pages and gain high ranking among search engines. What this means is, you test phrases from your marketing surveys used by people actually searching the internet. You also find synonymous phrases. You select out the phrases that are used frequently, but for which there are relatively few web sites with matching content phrased in just that way. These two factors will vary between specific search engines.

These are the keywords that 1) will easily gain high ranking in search engines because there is little competition for them (more help on that in Step 6). 2) have been shown by statistics to have a high number of people searching on them. and 3) are also known to be used by people searching for what you produce, because those very people told you so in your surveys.

How would you find out items 1 and 2 above? Does that seem difficult? It sure does to me! At least, it would if I didn't know about a resource that is so cost-effective it could be called an unfair advantage. What is this resource? In a word: " Wordtracker. " Go there now and read their literature and try out their demo. Enough said. There is no point in my repeating here what you can find out at Wordtracker.

Step 3. Pick the very best keyword phrase and make that your domain name.

You take the keyword, add dashes or possibly underscores for spaces, and that becomes your domain name. It could be something like "my-best-phrase.com" dependent upon the primary keyword phrase researched and chosen. Register that domain name.

Step 4. Design, develop and publish a web site to promote and sell your commercial products and to give away your goodwill products.

You may need to hire someone to help, or perhaps you will do the web design yourself. A lot depends on who you are (Step 1). Even if you hire someone to design your web site, you will need to provide the content--What you want to say about who you are, what you do and what you produce.

a)This will include "success stories," or testimonials,from those who have used your products

b) It can also include a "shopping cart" and a means of making purchases over the Internet, such as VISA or MASTERCARD . This one factor, taking credit card purchases, could be the most costly of up-front investment.

To save money in the early going, you could set up an Internet payment arrangement with PayPal .

Finally, you can also take checks or bank drafts. However, the faster the payment is conducted, followed by rapid shipment, the better.

c) Enhance the content of the web site with articles on a subject appropriate to your goals and your public's purposes, needs and wants.

This can lead to a newsletter emailed to anyone who is interested.

You and your partners probably have much knowledge which could be shared in this manner, or may know of articles which could be reprinted.

Step 5. Contact other web site owners who have an interest in promoting your goals and purposes and then have them add a link to your website.

You could trade links. That means, provide a link to each of their sites in exchange for a link from their sites back to yours. The links can be placed on a page for public interest, such as mine for "Electronics Project Design and Development Links"

But it is better to have non-reciprocal links pointing to your web site. How to do that? Seek out your friends who have web sites, call them on the telephone and ask them. Beyond that, set up pages of content in a few key locations outside your web site (buzz words follow, so go there to learn more):

Please note that I am not holding out my web site as an example of internet marketing at its best. I have used a small fraction of what I have learned from First Place Software and have become so overloaded with work that I have had to put my internet marketing on ice until I solve another problem: How to train enough people fast enough to meet demand. When I get to that point, I'll turn over my technical department and get real busy again on internet marketing.

Search engines rank web sites higher if they have more quality sites linking to them. Perhaps you and your partners have some good candidates to approach for adding links back to your site.

If you have deep pockets, you should also go ahead with an affiliate, or referral partner, program as in step 9.

Step 6. Plan the promotion of the web site by optimizing it for the various major directories and search engines.

This entails a lot of work, including designing special web pages, made possible by the use of the software Web Position Gold . Your web site could benefit through your use of this software.

Follow this link to find out more about Web Position Gold and even download a trial version.

Step 7. When the number of links pointing to your web site are sufficient to obtain high ranking with the keywords you have researched, and your web pages are optimized for the particular search engines, submit the web pages or sites to the major search engines.

Per the strategies outlined by Brent Winters, the submittal is made from a different web site, from a different web host location, than your site.

There are intricate strategies involved in getting placed high in search engines

and directories.

Step 8. Review the search engine positioning periodically and revise web pages as needed.

Step 9. As revenues permit, establish a referral system.

A referral system operates through purchasing and using referral tracking software . Referrals to your site are rewarded with commissions when purchases are made. This increases the number of links to your site, with higher search engine positioning, as well as direct sales from referrals.

Step 10. Expand the scope of your marketing.

As things are starting to roll, sales are up and profits being made, you have the option to invest time and money in other marketing research and campaigns. For example, you could promote the web site in business publications as revenues permit.


Step 11.  Continue to enhance the content of the web site and newsletter with more articles and successes on your chosen subject area.

Good luck in your endeavors.

Golden Gate Graphics resides in Aurora, a suburb of Denver located in the middle of the Rocky Mountain Front-Range High-Tech Corridor , which includes the following Colorado cities from south to north:
Fountain, Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake, Castle Rock, Highlands Ranch, Centennial, Englewood, Littleton, Denver, Golden, Aurora, Broomfield, Louisville, Lafayette, Boulder, Niwot, Longmont, Loveland, Ft. Collins and Greeley.