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Golden Rules of Online Sucess

One of the first casualties of the dot bomb was boo.com, which blew a staggering £95 million of venture capitalist money.

Luckily, you don't need to have the budget of Boo.com when it comes to effective advertising online. But where do you start and what are the golden rules for ensuring your online presence is successful?

1- Be Realistic!

If you are planning to promote a website or starting to develop an online strategy, don't be tempted by any company that says they can promote your website for a few hundred pounds!
Consider this- for your site to be considered (not listed, considered) for the Yahoo directory, it costs $300. What then, can a company that provides online marketing for £400 say, really do for you?

Search engines and directories are the number one tool for delivering targeted traffic to a web site, but there is much involved in getting a site to the top of them. From researching where the markets are, how potential customers search, who the competitors are, how they are promoted, to the creation of search engine friendly pages, manual registration and analysis and re-optimisation of a website, there is much more involved than sticking a few keywords into a site and crossing fingers.

2- Getting To The Top Of Google Takes Time

In the long distant past, there was once a rebel site called Google. Oh, how easy it was to get listed in. Years later, after many updates and algorithm changes, Google is somewhat of a thorny little critter. To get placed high in Google listings today, takes a lot of time and patience!

From the initial registration of a site into Google, it can take up to four months for the site to be fully indexed. And that's where the hard work begins. Ensuring the links within the site are optimised, ensuring the site receives good quality in bound links and that content is fresh and relevant- all this counts to helping get good placement but it takes time- so be patient!

3 - Google is not the Only Search Engine!

OK, I admit Google is very important in any online marketing strategy- but Google is not the centre of the universe!! Remember Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL make up approximately 30% of the online marketing and they are planning to claw back the online ground they have lost to Google- so don't forget them.

4- Running A Google Adwords Or Overture / Yahoo Pay Per Click- Do It Properly!

Don't underestimate the pay per click search engines. Sure, they seem simple to set up, but they can become costly and time consuming. They can also waste money if the promotion is not targeted and set up properly.
If you are planning on running a PPC campaign, make sure you or the company running it, knows the fundamentals of doing so.

5- Online Advertising Should Be Part Of Your Overall Marketing Strategy

Many companies make the mistake of placing their online marketing budget within their website spend. Online advertising is rapidly developing into a medium of its own and is now cutting into the budgets that would normally have be spent on paper / radio / tv advertising.

As such, it is best to see online advertising as part of an overall marketing strategy, which should be developed to complement any offline activity.

6 - Make Sure Your Site Is Usable And Accessible

You website is receiving traffic. However, it is not converting to sales or enquiries. There are many reasons why a site doesn't convert. This can be as simple as broken links to serious problems such as users unable to understand or access the website.
Its amazing how many times over the years I have encountered companies who think a website should stroke their ego! Remember a website should please the user first, the search engines second and then you!

7- Analyse, Analyse, Analyse

You have set up pay per click campaigns, you are sending out emails, you are ranking across the search engines- but how do you make sure that all that spend is wisely spent? One of the big buzzwords this year is 'return on investment'. With more and more budgets being spent online, it is not surprising that companies want to see where this is going.

By effectively tracking and measuring how all-online ventures are performing, a company can get a clear idea of which marketing tools are working, but most importantly, which are not, which I guess in retrospect would probably have been useful for Boo!

Noreen Cleary is Marketing Director of Elemental Creative Ltd, a specialist Internet marketing and website testing company. For more information, click on www.elementalcreative.co.uk/products.html for 21-day FREE trial of PPC Bid Management and Website ROI Tracking Software

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