Successful Website Marketing
January 20th, 2007 by Mike Read more about Blog Marketing, Google AdWordsWant to Make Your Website Marketing Successful?
Here is three powerful tips to help you get started with successful website marketing.
We recently started our private internet marketing forum where we personally answer the top website marketing questions of our readers and far and way one of the single most asked questions was:
How do I start driving traffic to my website and become successful with website marketing?
Successful website marketing means that you are able to drive a significant amount of traffic to your website and see a positive return on investment on the advertising dollars (if any) that you spent on your website marketing efforts.
To be successful with website marketing you have to master three domains:
First successful website marketing tip:
You have to master pay-per-click advertising. It is by far the single fastest way to start driving traffic to your website. The beauty of pay-per-click advertising is that Google AdWords has created a level playing field where anyone, including YOU, can compete with the worlds biggest companies.
However, to avoid getting burnt by Google AdWords you have to know what you are doing. Everyone that you are competing with has probably been advertising on Google AdWords for years so if you are just getting started check out the leading guides on Google AdWords.
We wrote about them here:
The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords
Second successful website marketing tip:
You have to master search engine optimization. The holy grail of a highly profitable website is receiving lots of free traffic by getting great placement and exposure on search engines such as google. The hardest part here is that search engine optimization is a very crowded space and the way to win in this game is by becoming an expert in getting links.
If you still think that getting links to your site is all about sending out emails to beg for reciprocal links, then you are about 6 years behind the state of the art. I suggest that you start subscribing to the leading SEO blogs such as Search Engine Land. One fantastic way to do well with SEO is to start a blog and post excellent content. If you keep that up for a long time, you too will start to get more readers, more links pointing to your blog, and more exposure via natural search. Our blog, for example, already gets hundreds of daily visitors from excellent blog posts that achieve a #1 ranking for key phrases such as “successful website marketing.”
Third successful website marketing tip:
You have to figure out how to generate word-of-mouth. Word of mouth marketing is often confused with “generating buzz” and with “viral marketing.” Word of mouth is what you are after because it means that your customers and site visitors want to start a conversation about your product and website with people that they know. Buzz on the other hand, is just a PR stunt that gets you some attention for a short period of time but then fades away. Viral marketing will get people to forward messages (such as email jokes, funny videos, etc.) but it is usually not an endorsement of your website or service. The holy grail of course is viral word of mouth marketing. While this is not easy to do, if you make your product or website remarkable, people will want to talk about it.
I would love to hear your thoughts on what you believe are some of the other key ingredients of successful website marketing. In this post I have only focused on one important aspect of successful website marketing and that is how to drive traffic to your site.
Recent posts by Mike
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About the Author
Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype.
Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.
Check out other posts by Mike
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Here *are* three powerful tips…
Thanks for an excellent Blog.
I would actually exchange the 3rd tip to “Testing”. If you want to be successful at Website Marketing, testing is definitely a high priority.
Hi Peter,
You are so right! I would definitely say that testing is absolutely key. In the above three points I only focused on traffic generation which is why I did not mention testing.
However, testing is so critical that I probably should have mentioned it. After all, that is what we are all about. Part of our core DNA is to test and measure everything because you can only improve the things that you can measure. Thank for brining this up.
actually, i’d change the 3rd tip to “you have to master *viral* marketing”.. that is, you should understand how to use links, email, widgets, and other product features to enable your customers to tell others.
“word of mouth marketing”, imho, is really more about building a great product, not doing great marketing. if you build a great product, no matter how much your marketing sucks your customers will get the word out. doesn’t necessarily work the other way around.
otoh, if you build a *good* product, mastering viral marketing (along with tips #1 & #2 on SEM & SEO) could dramatically help your efforts to raise awareness & attract customers.
in summary:
a) if you’re in product, your 3 best tips are:
1) do market research to understand customers & build to suit
2) do usability testing to gather qualitative data & iterate
3) use A/B testing & other analytics to gather quantitative data & iterate
b) if you’re in marketing, your 3 best tips are:
1) do SEM to generate paid / guaranteed visitors, measure cost & conversion
2) do SEO to genreate free / unknown visitors & measure volume
3) viral feature marketing (primarily email & links, also widgets, etc)
extra credit:
- sometimes PR also works — consider it as an alternative to SEM & SEO, and measure/assess cost & result to see whether to re-invest in PR. also note that you can use SEO to assist PR, and vice versa
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
ps - “are”, not is…
Hi Dave,
Thanks for chiming in! You are dead on when you say:
“actually, i’d change the 3rd tip to “you have to master *viral* marketing”.. that is, you should understand how to use links, email, widgets, and other product features to enable your customers to tell others.”
That is exactly what we are working on at http://www.blinklist.com. This coming week we will be launching a new widget that makes it super simple and easy for users to add new content to their personal web sites and blogs. Of course, the widget links back to BlinkList so by providing a great service we hope to also get the word out of our product.
[...] As Dave McClure pointed out in our article on “Successful Website Marketing” there is another way and that is that you have to master “viral marketing.” I think Dave is dead on and will get back to you on what it takes to succeed with viral marketing. [...]
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