Basic Internet Marketing Techniques for Beginners

There are many things you can do to successfully market your web site and bring in those all important visitors to your site.
The most important factor to take into consideration is what sort of visitors do you want.

- First - Find your 'target' market,

- Then - Go out and get the traffic.

If you don't go about marketing your site in this way you may be able to get a high amount of traffic to your sites but that doesn't necessarily mean more sales.

For example;
If you have a site that sells blue suede shoes, and you advertise under the heading shoes, you might get thousands of visitors looking for shoes coming to your site.
Of those thousands, there will only be a small percentage who are looking specifically for 'blue suede'shoes.
If you concentrate your marketing efforts on getting visitors by advertising 'blue suede shoes' from the start, then you will get fewer visitors that is certain, but the visitors you do get will be 'pre-qualified'.
They will be coming to your site already looking for what you have to offer.
As such, your sales per visitor will be Greatly increased and as so many of the different forms of Internet advertising today are when it comes down to it, charging per visitor then you will start to see the importance of this 'niche' marketing system in attracting the right sort of visitor to your site right from the outset.

So, to go about getting traffic to our site what do we do?

There are many different methods, here are just a few.

• Search engine Directory inclusion (see SEO)
• PPC search engines
• Adwords
• Articles
• Forums / Newsgroups
• Classified ads (Internet)
• Blogs
• Offline publicity

Search Engine Inclusion
This is the absolute best form of bringing in visitors to your site and it's completely free...   and ridiculously difficult.With millions of web sites on line there are literally hundreds of thousands of entries in the search engines for any one given search term or 'keyword'... if you do manage to get your site listed by a search engine it is most probable that when people type in your keyword that your site will appear low down in the listings on the 8,000th page of results.

There is an art (or is it a science) to achieving high listings in the search engines by means of subtle changes to the text and layout of your web pages. This art is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). For more on the subject see our SEO page. PPC Search engines.

Most search engines these days have a PPC system (Pay Per Click) integrated in one form or another. Basically, you bid on a certain keyword, and the highest bidder gets their site listed towards the top of the search results page (SERP) and has to pay the bid amount each time their link is clicked upon. Each search engine has its own way of displaying the results. Some as straight results and others as 'sponsored links'.

The more popular your search term the more it will cost you. For example, to get the top bid on the search term shoes with overture (providing search results for yahoo amongst others) would cost you $0.71 each time your link was clicked on, For the term 'blue suede shoes' however, the cost was only $0.34 per click. Red suede shoes was even more economic at $0.18 and for 'yellow suede shoes' the top ranking could be achieved with a minimum bid of $0.10 per click.