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Online marketing is just one of many activities we are charged with overseeing as small business owners. We have to wear a lot of hats.
If your website is going to drive business to you it is going to cost you one of two things: time or money. There are no “magic bullets” that will bring business to your website for a small amount of money and little investment of time on your part.
Although there are plenty of companies that will try to sell you on the “get rich quick” programs, there are certain immutable laws of marketing on the Internet that must be followed. These laws require that good content be built for your website that is worthy of good search results, high traffic, and loyal visitors.
With online marketing (and every other business activity we undertake) you have one of four choices.
1. Get The Training To Do It Yourself
2. Hire Someone To Do It In-House
3. Outsource It
4. Don’t Do It At All
In this section of this four part blog post we will be discussing what to consider if you choose to do your own online marketing.
Learning Online Marketing Yourself
This is the best option for those that are on a “shoestring” budget. Online marketing is not difficult but it does require that you learn a skillset and master the basics.
To acquire this skillset, I strongly recommend hiring someone to deliver online marketing training to you or someone in your organization.
Be sure that your training will consist of at least the following:
1. How to ensure that your website is accessible (AKA crawlable, indexable) by search engines.
2. How to develop a system of processes and a platform to develop and publish good content for your website quickly and easily.
3. How to “broadcast” the content from #2 to other websites via RSS, social bookmarking, press releases and social media websites.
4. How to do basic keyword research and incorporate it into the HTML on your website via the title tag, meta description and heading tags.
5. How to install and interpret some basic website analytics such as Google Analytics.
If you learn these basics of search engine optimization and begin building good content for your website you will begin to see your website traffic increase.
If you really want to do this on the cheap you should continue to read this blog and others on the subject of search engine optimization (SEO), social media and online video. Also, consider getting up to date information by subscribing to podcasts on these same subjects. You should also be looking for how-to videos on places like You-Tube .
If you are looking for the best of the best resources in online marketing you can consult the 3 must reads category of this blog. I have been reading blogs on these subjects for several years and these “must read” blog posts will give you quick access to the best bloggers in the industry.
Read Part 2 of this four part blog post on hiring an online marketer in-house.
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