Overview

Like offline marketing, online marketing should also work to plan - if you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there? If you don 't know how to get there, then you've got even less chance of getting where you want to be.

In any online marketing plan, it is highly likely that one of main aims is to get more visitors to your website because more visitors should mean more enquiries, and more enquiries means more opportunities to make sales. The process leading to conversion requires careful consideration in a number of areas including:

Many sites attract large numbers of visitors, many of these sites also receive a large number of enquiries, but any business will know that it is the conversion of these leads into sales which really matters. There are a number of online marketing measures outlined in this report below which can not only get you more visitors and enquiries, but improve your conversion rate too.

It's very hard to manage what you can't measure, and the nature of online media allows you luxuries which aren't necessarily the case in offline marketing such as being able to test, measure and change many aspects of your online presence and marketing communications very quickly and inexpensively until you're sure you're delivering the message that brings the most response.

You don't have to just register your website with the search engines and then sit back hope for the best. Having your website properly optimised and submitted to the major search engines (and relevant directories) is crucial but there are many other strategies - all very important - that most people ignore or simply don't know about, and consequently lose visitors and sales. These strategies are outlined in the report below and include:

1 - Viral Traffic Generators

Viral marketing is 'self-perpetuating' advertising which compels people to share it via e-mail or word of mouth. This allows the message to spread (like a virus). A good example of viral marketing is Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail service which owes its success to including a small Hotmail advertisement on the bottom of every e-mail sent from the system. The main benefits of viral marketing are that it:

Some key characteristics of a successful viral marketing campaign are:

Ways to add viral aspects to your marketing campaign include:

Viral traffic generation programs are generally based on the same principle as MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) which is the more people you can recruit to join the network, the more traffic will be directed to your own site. An example of this is a pop-up and pop-under exchange. When joining the exchange, some code is placed in your site which launches pop-ups and pop-unders for other peoples websites when your website is visited. In exchange for this, pop-ups linking to your website are launched elsewhere in the network e.g. see http://www.w3exit.com

With any multi-level marketing program, it only really pays off when you build your own downline e.g. signing lots of people up to your affiliate program will mean many more hits are generated than there could have been if you were working at it on your own.

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