The 5 Essential Rules of Internet Marketing

by Charlie Cook
©2007 In Mind Communications, LLC - All rights reserved.

Want to generate more sales with your internet marketing?
If you’re struggling to attract visitors to your site, to generate leads and to sell your products and services online, you’re not alone.

Many small business owners who have put up web sites are in the same boat; frustrated and wishing they were more successful online.

You’re spending money to keep a web site up and running; you’re spending money on pay-per-click advertising; and the site is only producing a trickle of sales. Sound familiar?

The problem isn’t an awareness of your current situation, the limp results are all too painfully apparent. Nor is the problem one of goals. You know you want your web site to bring in $100,000 or $500,000 a year or more.

What can you do to get from where you are with your internet marketing to where you want to be?

My son Evan, a junior in college, recently returned from traveling in Europe with a friend. They made a low-budget, whirlwind tour of London, Rome, Florence and Amsterdam.

Neither of them had traveled on their own or visited those places before or spoke Italian or Dutch, but they knew what they wanted to see. Their strategy for making the most of the limited time they had in each city was simple.

Pick up a small guidebook, a street map, and map of public transit. Then plan a route that includes all the sights that could possibly be squeezed into a day. With good information, they accomplished everything they wanted to in each city.

Marketing on the web is like traveling abroad for many people. They don’t know the language, they don’t have a good guide or guide book and they’re easily lost and confused about how to get where they want to go.

This is not a vacation, though, its your business, and you don’t want to lose time and money wandering in circles. To reach your web site marketing goals, you need a guide with solid information. Get the proven, step by step Creating Web Sites That Sell and discover how to sell more with your web site. Use this link to claim your copy >>

The 5 Rules of Website Marketing

Rule 1 – Know Where You Want to Go
Before my son Evan arrived at the Rome airport, he’d made a list of his objectives. He had a short time and wanted to get to the most important classical sites. There are key objectives in onlinr marketing, too, that should be on every business owner’s list.

These include:

- Knowing how to attract a flood of traffic,
- Getting people to give you their contact information,
- Building relationships with prospects in order to convert them to clients,
- Motivating your prospects to take action so they buy from you.

Rule 2 –Get a Good Map
If marketing on the web were obvious, you and everyone you know would already be multi-millionaires. To reach your objectives you’ll need a detailed, up to date map that shows you how to make your online business highly profitable. Use this link to get your map to online marketing >>

Rule 3 – Choose the Best Route
If you’re going to get to St. Peters, the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, the Castle Sant’Angelo, the Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, and the Republican temples in Rome all in one day and still have time for lunch, you’ll need a plan. (And, yes, Evan did all that in one day.)

You’ll need to know where to begin and how best to get from place to place. The web is the same. You’ll need a web site marketing guide to take you step by step to increased sales.

Here are some of the areas you’ll need a map for:

Generating Leads
• Creating a site the search engines will love,
• Taking the shortcut to top search engine placement,
• Writing pay-per-click ads that will drive people to your site.

Converting Leads to Sales
•  Prompting people to contact you,
•  Writing compelling content,
•  Knowing when to use short and long copy in your internet marketing,
•  Knowing when and how to include links in your site,
•  What to do to follow up to convert interested prospects into paying clients,
• Increasing per client sales,
•  Knowing what information to track and measure.

Rule 4 – Know When to Change Course
If you were lost in a strange city, you wouldn’t keep walking around in circles. At some point, you’d look for someone to ask for help.

Marketing online is the same. It’s not a linear path and occasionally you’ll make mistakes, we all do. The key to being successful is to quickly recognize when you’re headed in the wrong direction get the help you need to get going in the right direction.

Ready to get your website marketing going in the right direction. Use this link >>

Rule 5 – Act on the Numbers
Foreign as it still is to many business people, marketing online has some distinct advantages over traditional media. For one thing, you have access to information which can tell you exactly how many people saw your ad, how many responded to it, how many signed up at your site and how many bought from you.

You can try out ads and ad copy at very low cost. You can compare the response rate to two different ads side by side.

You can test copy and design elements on your web pages to see which attract clients and which send them away.

Using readily available online information, you can easily determine your lead acquisition and client acquisition costs. Then you can leverage this data to cut your costs and increase your profits dramatically.

For example if you have a page on your site you where you want to get people to give you their contact information you can track the number of people who come to the page versus the number who sign up. If you’re conversion rate is less than 20% you know that something is wrong and you need to change the design or copy.

Check your conversion rates monthly, if not weekly, and adjust your website marketing tactics accordingly.