Critical Tips for Your Online Marketing Efforts

Experience is more or less defined as learning from your mistakes. Online, that can be an expensive proposition. To save you some money, here are a couple of things I have learned over the last 9 years.

1. Offering an Affiliate Program – Many sites consider the option of offering an affiliate program to get others to promote their sites. While this is pretty standard, make sure you are comfortable with others using your brand in just about any way you can imagine.

2. Using Keywords in SEO - Once you have researched your keywords for SEO, consideration needst to be given regarding how to lay them out in your site. Personally, I try to use no more than six per page and often go with just one phrase.

3. Keywords in Your Published Articles – If you publish articles to promote your site, be careful! If you put your main keyword phrases in the articles, the listings in the article directory may outrank you site!

4. Keyword Research and Tails - When conducting keyword research, people often mistakenly focus on two word phrases. You should look for the tail phrases, which are three to four words. There is less competion for rankings, but still plenty of traffic.

5. PPC vs SEO - The debate between PPC and SEO is a non-starter. If you don't have rankings, market with PPC. If you do, turn off all PPC ads for keywords under which you rank in the top 10.

6. Search Engines That Matter - There are tons of search engines out there, but only three matter - Yahoo, Google and MSN. They control most of the traffic on the web, so don't make the mistake of focusing on other engines.

7. Monitoring Rankings - Once you start to get rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN, there is a tendency to check them every day. Don't. It is a huge waste of time. Check them no more than once or twice a week.

8. The Holy Grail of Type in Traffic – Regardless of the type of site you have, your ultimate goal is to get type in traffic. This occurs when a person types in your domain name instead of using a search engine. Amazon.com gets lots of type in traffic.

9. AOL vs Google - Is AOL or Google a better marketing forum for you? Well, it is a trick question. Google provides many of the search results for AOL. Focus on Google and you will appear on AOL.

10. MSN vs Google Search Engines - When marketing, you need to know which search engines to focus on. Google has the advantage of controlling the most traffic, but rankings come slowly. MSN will rank sites quickly, but has little traffic.

Opening an online site isn’t so much a business venture as it is a lifestyle. Regardless of how you try to resist it, your site will consume your attention and time. The above advice will hopefully make life a little cushier.

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Spencer Pirres is with MarketingTitan.com - providing article marketing services.
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