Internet Marketing Strategies

Every company of any size should be making both short and long-term Internet marketing investments on a consistent basis. I won’t belabor all the reasons why, suffice it to say that with 173 million US eyeballs on the Internet last month it has become the most important media platform for communicating with both prospects and customers.

Since so many website owners and developers seem to have either forgotten or never learned some of the most important A, B, C’s for Internet marketing success, let’s take a minute to review:

A - You have to have a great site! The bar is high now and so are user expectations. You can drive a ton of traffic to a website but if they don’t want what you got when they get there, then you won’t have success. I am always amazed at how poorly so many websites are designed, not to mention how badly they communicate their value propositions and product/service offerings. For example, if you could only do one thing on my website, will it be the one most important thing I really want you to do? Or will you be distracted by all the other stuff? Most sites fail this simple little test.

B - You must have a real Internet business model that works! (Should I repeat this one for emphasis?) This is a lot easier said than done. Just think about all those thousands of well funded Internet companies with great management teams who failed miserably and most of which had pure ad models at the time. I remember when Yahoo lost a majority of their ad sales when the bubble burst and the first thing they did was to diversify their revenue streams by adding Yahoo Personals and HotJobs.com. These hosted software services provide recurring revenues and help to diversify their revenues in large markets. What is your model? Are all your eggs all in one basket?

C – Assuming you have A + B (otherwise it’s a waste of time and money to add C), then add C which is as much quality traffic as you can possibly find at a reasonable price. Yes, of course that includes CPC campaigns and natural search traffic, but your long-term Internet marketing strategies should go beyond these basics.

For example, I like to ask companies this question, “Why would you only have one website, when you could be promoting five? Or why would you have five, when you could have five hundred?” Does that sound extreme to you? Believe me it’s not. I operate a one man company (well, except for a few virtual worker bees in India and Argentina) yet have more than a thousand websites in my network of sites. So yes, I can say with certainty that growing your domain names portfolio is a critically important component towards accomplishing your short and long-term Internet marketing objectives.

And according to the other “domainers” I know, who like me attend the Traffic conferences, domain names are the real estate of the Internet and like land, “they aren’t making it anymore!” Are you building your domain names portfolio? If not, you definitely should be! This is an important part of your short and long-term Internet marketing strategies.