Gerald Ferguson

What are the 10 best tips for beginners to get started marketing a business online?

I seem to be surrounded by friends and associates who have started side businesses to supplement or replace their income. When they find out that I do web marketing, they all ask the same question: What should I be doing to promote my business online? Beginners need simple, quick, and easy ways to get started with web marketing. These business owners are people that have very busy lives between running a business, trying to keep it alive with marketing, and personal life. So what are the best ways for a time-and-money-starved beginner to market a business on the web? Is it even possible?

I’ve tried to direct them to some of the online resources that I’ve found helpful, but many of the articles and forums about web marketing are targeted at industry insiders and assume some degree of previous knowledge on web marketing.  I have years of experience in web marketing and have a good feel for how to get the most bang-for-the-buck when it comes to web marketing, so I’ve decided to write a detailed article on 10 web marketing tips for total beginners.

So here they are …

The ten most cost-effective, time-saving, best-bang-for-the-buck, beginner’s tips for promoting your business online -

1. Choose Your Target Market Well.

So many beginners’ businesses flounder because they want to sell everything to everyone. Many startups fail just by trying to sell one thing to everyone. Marketing is easiest and most cost effective when you narrow your target market because you can focus more dollars on promoting key differentiators. Once you have targeted your market, you can pick a few key phrases or words that describe your product or service.

2. Carefully Research Keywords.

Think about the one phrase that visitors will use to search for and find your site. In my experience, it is best for beginners to choose a 3-4 keyword phrase that specifically describes your product or service like “arizona wedding photographer” or “free lunch coupons“. Choosing a 3-4 keyword phrase will make it much easier to compete than more general keywords like “photographer” and “coupons”.

Once you have chosen the single phrase that describes your entire site, you can choose supporting phrases for each of the other pages on your website. Focus on one keyword phrase or idea per page, and make sure that it supports the overall phrase for the website.

3. Find the Perfect Domain Name.

Your domain name is your web address. There are a couple schools of thought regarding domain names. You could pick a branding-related domain name like ‘google.com’ or ‘FergusonPhotography.com“. Or you could match your chosen keyword phrase as closely as possible, which usually means that it is a product, service, or geographically-related domain name like ‘ArizonaPoolDecks.com‘

There are pros and cons to both approaches. Branding-related domains can take longer to start ranking well, but they are usually more memorable. Most of the good product-related domains are taken, and the ones that are available tend to be longer and harder to remember.

If you do a lot of offline advertising (print, cold calling/telephone sales, billboards/road signs, word of mouth) then a short, memorable, branding-related domain name may be for you. On the other hand, if you plan to rely heavily on Google and search engine rankings to bring traffic to your website, a product/service-related domain will help a lot. The ideal domain name would combine the best of these approaches – a short, memorable domain name that contains your keywords and your brand. But finding that perfect domain name can be really difficult.

If you are unsure about which domain name you should get, I can help you figure out which strategy is best and research the best domain name candidates.

4. Whip Your Website Into Shape.

Whether you are just starting a website or you are already running a relatively successful online business, your website is the central gathering place for your customers, and it should be a well-oiled machine for churning out transactions and conversions. Here are some tips for beginners to improve their websites -

• Install Google Analytics on your website! This is so important that I gave it it’s own section in this list. See below.
• If your website design is awful, get it redesigned. I can help you design a beautiful, functional website. Contact me about it today.
• There are a whole bunch of nerdy ‘behind the scenes’ things that need to be in place in order for your site to rank well on Google – collectively, this list of things is called Seach Engine Optimization (SEO). the list of things deserves its own article, but in a nutshell, each page of your site needs a few things -
  • Focus on ONE keyword phrase per page. Don’t try to fit everything and the kitchen sink in there. Each page really needs to revolve around one central idea that can be congealed into a 3-word keyword phrase.
  • Make that 3-word keyword phrase the title of your page. This means your keyword phrase should be the html <title> element as well as the actual title in an <h1> element at the top of the page. If you just went ‘huh?’, contact me, and I can help.
  • Write a keyword-rich meta-description. Again, I can help with this.
  • The page should have quality, meaty text and contain your keyword phrase in as many natural ways as you can fit it in. A blog is a really easy way to accomplish this. More about blogs later.
• If you can’t make edits to your website yourself, I’d suggest using a content management system (CMS) to help you. A content management system basically makes it possible for you to easily edit text and images on your website so that you don’t have to call your webmaster every time you need to make a small change. My favorite content management systems are WordPress and Drupal, and they are both free. You just download them, then install them on your web host. Contact me if you’d like help setting them up.
• At a minimum, your website should have the following pages/sections:
  • Home Page – The home page (an most interior pages for that matter) should answer the following questions -
    • What is this?
    • What do they have here?
    • What can I do here?
    • Why should I be here and not somewhere else?
    • What do I do next?
  • About Us Page – About you and your business. You answer this question all day long.
  • Products/Services Page – What do you sell? Most of the time, each product or service should get its own page.
  • Contact Us Page – A contact form that also shows your phone and mailing address/map.
• A great book on making the best website in the whole world is “Don’t Make Me Think“, by Steve Krug. Highly recommended, and it’s become my central philosophy for building awesome websites.

5. Install Google Analytics.

What gets measured gets improved. Google Analytics is a free tool that will measure how much traffic your website gets, where it is coming from, and what visitors on your site are doing.

Install Google Analytics on your website TODAY, if you haven’t already. This is not optional. It is free and really easy to do, but if you need help, just contact me and I’ll help you out. Bookmark this page, then go do it now. I’ll wait…

Once you’ve installed Google Analytics, you can feel better knowing that you can measure areas where you are improving and where you still need help. Trying to improve your web marketing without analytics is like fighting blind. You need to know what is working so that you can get maximum ROI for your time and money. The online help for Google Analytics is all right, but if you need more help identifying areas for improvement or with anything else, I’m a Google Analytics guru – call me with your questions.

6. Start a Blog.

A blog is simply a listing of self-published articles about your product, service, or industry. Usually, blogs allow visitors to comment on the articles that you have written, but most blogs will also allow you to turn off comments if you feel the need to strictly control your message. Writing blog entries about your industry, product, or service accomplishes a few things -

• Well written blog entries establish you as an authority in your industry. For example, based on what you’re reading right now, would you be more likely to trust me to help you market your business online?
• Blog articles are full of the kind of ‘meaty goodness’ that attract Google and other search engines.
• Your blog can be a conversation starter for many of your other online marketing efforts.

Start by setting a realistic goal to write one 300 to 500 word blog article per week. Stick with your goal, and don’t skip a week. Regularity is more important than frequency. If you are feeling particularly creative and gung-ho, you can write a bunch of articles ahead of time and publish them on a regular schedule. You don’t want to start strong and just fizzle – I’ve seen it happen too many times. Pick a pace you can realistically keep up with and stick with it.

If you need help setting up a blog (I suggest WordPress or Blogger) or have more questions about blogging, just let me know.

7. Spread the Word with Email Marketing

Why do you get so much email spam? Believe it or not, it works! Email marketing is consistently one of the most cost-effective ways for beginners to market their businesses online. The good news is, you don’t have to be a spammer to use email to your benefit, and setting it up is actually pretty easy.

For beginners, I recommend setting up an account with one of the ‘hosted’ email marketing providers like Mailchimp or iContact. Mailchimp is my favorite because it is extremely easy to use, but also gives you room to grow with a lot of options as you become an email marketing ninja.

“But where do I get an email list?” is the next question. If there is one thing about email marketing that I could drill into beginner’s heads it is this: GET PERMISSION. Always get someone’s permission before you start sending them emails because you’ll see a far better response from people that actually want to hear what you’re preachin’. There are places online where you can purchase email lists, but you cannot simply trust that the emails on many lists were obtained by permission. It can also be against the law to continually send unsolicited emails.

The easiest way for beginners to start gathering quality email addresses on their own is to put an email signup form on their website. Put the signup form in a place where people will see it – maybe at the top of a sidebar – and then provide a ‘carrot on a stick’ that encourages them to give you their email address. Your ‘carrot’ might be some free information in the form of a whitepaper, or downloadable pdf with free information about your product or industry. Or maybe it could be an instructional video or a coupon. The point is, it should be something that is valuable enough to the customer that they’ll give you their email address to get it.

I have a bunch of ideas for ‘carrots’ that you might use. If you give me your email address, I’ll send them to you

8. Get a Quick ‘Shot in the Arm’ with Pay-Per-Click Ads

Pay per click(PPC) ads are an easy way to get instant traffic (and hopefully sales) to your website. Google AdWords is the most popular PPC provider. It is easy to sign up and get started showing your ads today, and best of all, you’ve probably already done the hard work by choosing your targeted keyword phrases. Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing also offer opportunities for PPC advertising. The keys to running a successful PPC campaign are to choose targeted keywords, write effective ads, and match those effective ads with effective ‘landing pages’ on your website.

A ‘landing page’ is where a customer ‘lands’ on your site after clicking on an ad. Ideally, you should have specially tailored landing pages for each message, promotion, product, service, or offer. Experience shows that the more specific and consistent your promotional message is from the ad to the landing page, the more likely that customer will convert. If you are simply sending all of your PPC traffic to your homepage, you could be missing out on business. I am a PPC and landing page expert, and I can help you develop ‘sticky’ landing pages that will be more effective at converting customers.

9. Promote and Syndicate via Social Media

What is the big deal about social media? You may already have a Facebook account and wonder “How could I possibly use Facebook to promote my business?” Or you might be thinking, “I just don’t have time to spend on social media sites, I need to promote my business!”

The good news is, promoting your business via social media can add real dollars to your bottom line, and it doesn’t have to be a huge time-suck. The biggest thing to remember with social media is to be genuine. Here are some tips about how to get the most from social media services without spending ridiculous amounts of time -

• Facebook – Gain Fans
  • Use Facebook to ‘gain fans’ by setting up a page for your business.
  • Add a “Become a fan on Facebook” link to your email signature and on your website.
  • Every time you write a blog post, mention it on your Facebook page. This is free syndication.
  • Mention specials, discounts, and coupons on your Facebook page.
• Twitter – Keep Them Updated
  • Set up a Twitter account for your business
  • Whenever you write a blog post, mention it on twitter.
  • Twitter is great for posting timely discounts (Free car wash today when you mention twitter!)
• YouTube – Show Some Video
  • Create a video where you demonstrate your product or service.
  • You don’t need a professional video camera to do this, most digital still cameras have a video setting that will work fine.
• Flickr – Show Pictures
  • Flickr is one of the best-known and busiest photo-sharing sites on the web.
  • Most businesses have pictures of their product or service that they’d like to show off, so why not use Flickr to hold your photos online?
  • Create a free Flickr account, and upload your photos.

As you can see, you can use social media to accomplish many of the things you’d already be doing as a business – syndication, image and video hosting, and keeping customers updated. And the great news is that all of these services are free. You don’t have to spend hours on them, just do what you can, and as long as you’re genuine, your customers will feel closer to you because of the intimate, transparent relationship you’ve created with social media tools.

10. Put It All Together

Wow, that might seem like a lot of stuff to remember, but I’ll show you how easy it is to do all of these things in a typical week of marketing for an online business -

• Monday – Keyword Day
  • Think about some keywords that you’d like to rank well on Google for. Do some Googling to get ideas for a blog article about these keywords. (10 minutes)
• Tuesday – Simmer Day / Email Day
  • Let those keywords/ideas simmer and develop over the next day or so
  • Try to congeal a blog posting and an idea for a video or photo
  • If this is the week that you’ll be sending an email, then send out an email that contains snippets of the previous week’s blog postings and a strong offer/call to action.Don’t forget the facebook and twitter buttons. (2 hours)
• Wednesday – Blog Day
  • Post a blog article of 300-500 words about your chosen keywords/idea (2 hours).
  • Update your status on your Facebook page to tell your fans that you posted to your blog (2 minutes).
  • Update your Twitter account to tell your followers that you posted to your blog (2 minutes).
  • Insert an image from your Flickr account into your blog post (5 minutes).
• Thursday – Video/Photo Day
  • Optionally record a video and upload it to YouTube (1 hour).
  • or shoot a photo and post it to Flickr (1 hour).
  • Create a blog post about the video/photo (10 minutes).
  • Again, syndicate your blog post to Facebook (2 minutes).
  • and to Twitter (2 minutes).
• Friday – Casual/Wrap-Up Day
  • Catch up on Twitter/Facebook postings
  • Check your stats on Google Analytics
  • Look for areas(keywords) to improve.
  • Wear shorts and flip-flops to work.
  • Watch some funny videos online.

Well, that’s all for now -

Thanks for reading, and I hope you feel a little more educated about how to market your online business as a beginner. As I mentioned numerous times throughout the article, I’m an online marketing expert, and I get paid to help people market their businesses online. If you are feeling overwhelmed by all of this information, and you’d just like someone to do it for you, I’d love to help you with your web marketing. Please contact me for a free, no-obligation consultation.

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