Want 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. 

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

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 Reining

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