The better way to sell online

Cornerstones of online marketing, 10 tips for online marketers

Selling and marketing online holds the same principles as it does offline. Product, Price, Promotion and Placement are the principle 4 "P's" of marketing.

Selling and marketing online holds the same principles as it does offline. Product, Price, Promotion and Placement are the principle 4 "P's" of marketing. One can also argue that 'Persona' can be added to the marketing mix because "how professional you look" plays a major part in how well you sell. In fact, all the other 4 P's of marketing fall under this fifth "P".

With the current World market recession, now is the time to focus on driving new business to your site.

Why? Because that is exactly what your competitors are doing.

The more you market and focus on what sells, the better your chances of survival during the recession. And once it's over, you will be that much further ahead than your competition.

So we have created this Top Ten List of Marketing Ideas to help you get started:

  1. Building Links — Builds traffic. You will find that many of the items in this list are cross related. This is the ultimate goal in eMarketing. Proper and lots of placement increases the chances your site will be found. And more importantly, the more links you have to your site, the higher you may rank on organic search engines.
  2. Advertising — Although you don't have to spend a fortune, you can budget for some paid advertising on a monthly basis. Pay-Per-Click (with capping), banner advertising, print or local newspaper market advertising are just some suggestions. The main goal in what you do with online advertising is to find methods which stick or stay online over extended periods of time. The more methods you find which remain online and lead new visitors to your site, the more you can focus on other methods of marketing.
  3. Blogs — Although not my favourite method of marketing, Blogging does have its place. It allows you to communicate and listen to your customers and find out what they really want. It also increases traffic to your website from other sources such as Google Blog Search. The downside is it can be time consuming if you are a small business, but has little or no cost associate with it.
  4. Social Marketing — Social websites such as Facebook and Twitter offer word-of-mouth interactivity you can utilize to help your brand growth. Not only can you set-up a separate web-page (as an addition to your website marketing), you can use Facebook Marketplace to post your products or services.
  5. Discount Offers — If you do run monthly newsletters or articles to your client base, make sure you use a call to action for increasing your sales. Offering a voucher or discount code for relevant products will increase your traffic and sales in the short-term. You can even offer sharable coupons that customers can pass on to other potential word-of-mouth customers.
  6. Setting Goals — This is off topic, but is extremely relevant. You can not do everything in one night. Ecommerce is an ongoing and continual process. Set about five goals and follow through with them. Once you have finished those goals, set-up another set and so on. Over time you will find that the steady gradual build-up will yield its own rewards. Be S.M.A.R.T — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound.
  7. Customer Service — This is the cornerstone of any business. Your growth from word-of-mouth depends on it. From social marketing to branding, your growth can change with a few kind words from one customer to another potential customer in a matter of minutes. You can also lose future business with bad word-of-mouth, so keep this in mind.
  8. Video — Product-in-use and presentation videos are an increasingly important trend in internet marketing. Merchandising videos provide a non-intrusive way of engaging customers with focused and precise methods of sales material. With video linking websites like YouTube, Veoh and a whole host of others — you can also further extend your marketing reach by posting your product videos. The added hidden exposure is you can link back to your site from these video sites, which increases your Search Engine Exposure.
  9. Accessibility — ensure your contact information is easily accessible and up to date. Nothing makes a customer feel more confident in purchasing from you than to be able to easily contact you. Having a Live Chat on your website can close more sales quickly. Forrester Research found merchants who use a reactive chat earned a 15 percent return on the chat itself and those who had a proactive chat earned 105% ROI.
  10. Branding — make sure you have a professional look and appearance — studies show "Credibility" is a significant contributor in how well you sell to your customers when they visit your website. Your word-of-mouth growth will increase by itself with this in mind.

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