The areas that most concern people initially are:

What should my domain name be?

How much is my hosting going to cost?

How do I get listed on Google?

These are all important questions to ask, but the most important area above all the others should be:

How will my site be updated?

My advice to all would be internet entrepreneurs is that, if you don’t have the budget to cover constant updates and changes to your site by a web designer, then make sure you have a site that you can update yourself. In some instances I would recommend a soft entry to the world wide web by having a single page site that holds all the information that a visitor will need to take whatever action you want them to take. That might be emailing you or contacting you by phone or joining a mailing list. Most importantly the information must be relevant and not time sensitive. This approach allows some breathing space to evaluate the response before taking the next step.

Some very inexpensive sites can be very simply and effectively updated by anyone with basic computer skills, the important thing is to commit to the process of updating on a regular basis. Alongside this should be a schedule of measuring response and changing content accordingly.

If you can keep your site up to date and relevant it can be a good tool for your business… if there is no site or a site with out of date or irelevant content, it won’t help you get any new business!

With the dawning of the internet and increasingly with web 2.0 this type of advertising is becoming unacceptable to the end user. The web audience is frequently choosing the content they wish to view and the marketing message is being carried in the content. As marketers this means we can act quickly and without the need to worry about making mistakes that can’t be altered… if we get it wrong, we can change it quickly.

One of the bets things about the Internet as a marketing tool is that you can measure success, or lack of it. You can create a page of content on your site and know its impact within a few hours, change things, measure again and gradually build a successful page. In the old world of marketing no such luxury existed, in fact it was and still is, difficult to measure the success of a traditional media campaign. Unless you’re directing viewers to a web page of course.

2. Decide on the type and frequency of email communication you will be sending. The key is to try and send regular emails and always keep the content relevant and useful to your audience, if you keep giving them he useful and timely information or tips etc when the time comes to actually sell something they will be much more receptive.
3. Add a sign-up form to your web site so you can start collecting new subscribers also import any existing lists of subscribers that have already expressed an interest in what you have to offer. It’s also generally acceptable to import the names of anyone who has done business with you in the past, provided you are going to be sending content relevant to their needs.
4. Create a good email template by using a template provided within the email software (again iContact is good for this), or design one yourself or come to us and we’ll help you to do this.
5. Develop quality relevant content for your newsletter or message and send it out to your list. Continue sending your newsletters, announcements, or promotions with consistent frequency. As your list grows, you will notice increased traffic (and if applicable, increased sales) on the day of and the days following an email send.
By providing quality relevant content that is genuinely helpful to customesr and potential customers you will succeed in keeping your brand in front of of your customers and build strong relationships with them.

The problem is you don’t want to appear to be biased and self promoting and risk potential customers disliking you and worse not believing you.

A good way round this is to find someone who can speak on your behalf, at least as an introduction. This could be a work colleague or someone who knows you well or even a paid professional who can present the case. The key is to have someone who your audience will see as being a qualified witness to your expertise in the subject and evidence suggests that people will not be influenced by whether this person is paid or otherwise.

Authors Noah J.Goldenstein and Steve J. Martin carried out a psychological experiment to prove this. Participants were asked to imagine themselves in the role of senior editor for a book publisher, facing the task of dealing with an experienced and successful author. They were asked to read excerpts from a negotiation for a sizeable book advance. One group read excerpts talking about the author’s accomplishments spoken by the author’s agent and the second group read the same identical comments made by the author himself. The resulting data confirmed that : “Participants rated the author more favourably on nearly every scale – especially likeability – when the author’s agent sang his praises as compared to when the author tooted his own horn.”

This is a technique we’ve recommended to clients at Recorded Devilery, where we’ve made short video clips using comments from experts and satisfied customers in a documentary format, rather than in house glossy self-promoting videos.

Try to answer the following:

• Who are my potential customers?
• What do they enjoy about my product or service or what problem does it solve?
• What content can I deliver to them that will be useful, entertaining or informative?
• What is the most effective way that I can deliver that content?

Thinking about these questions and answering them to yourself might just trigger a new way of approaching your customers in a way that will be enjoyable to you at the same time.

Rather than trying to directly sell your goods and services, why not provide educating or entertaining information about what you do that will inspire potential customers to find out more. There are a number of ways of delivering your content… web sites, blogs, podcasts, e-books, newsletters are just a few.

Pages need to be built in such a way that Google and other search engines can read them and therefore list them. We’ll stick to Google for now as in the UK it probably accounts for around three quarters of the searches carried out, and anyway most of the techniques will apply equally well to the other search engines.

In order to obtain a listing for your page Google sends out a robot or spider, which looks through the page and then adds it to the list of pages that it will re-visit from time to time to check for changes. The important thing to realize is the this robot doesn’t see the page in the same way that you or I - fancy graphics and flash movies mean nothing to it and neither do excessive chunks of java script and other code. This robot is mainly concerned with words and how they are used and Google will use these findings to rank your page according to relevance to search terms being entered by your potential visitors.

If you want to get highly ranked on Google for search terms used by your customers then the first thing to do is find out if Google is listing your pages at all. A simple way to do this is to visit Google in a web browser at:

http://www.google.co.uk

Type in “cache:” followed by your web site name, e.g. “cache:www.yoursite.co.uk”.

If all is well and your site is listed, this will show you the page that is listed, together with a message from Google which will tell you the last time the robot visited.

“site:www.yoursite.co.uk” will show you a list of all the pages that are currently listed by Google.

If nothing is returned from the cache search, then it’s time for you to get things moving and make sure you get your site listed. The most effective way to do this is to have a link to your site from another web site which is already in Google’s listings. Next time the robot visits this site it will follow the link to your page and read the content.

Another way is to visit Google and request a visit, although this technique is not always successful.

http://www.google.com/addurl

One of the most powerful tools that I think you can use for marketing on line is audio and video content. This might be in the form of a short piece of video on your web site explaining a process or offering an overview of your product, or could be in the form of a long running audio or video podcast series, syndicated across the web through sites like iTunes and YouTube. The exciting thing is that both of these possibilities are open to virtually any small business or individual, allowing you to compete on almost level terms with much larger organizations and big business.

As with all successful web marketing, this involves creating content that will appeal to your target buyers and then delivering it in a way in which they will find it, be interested in it and in an appropriate format for them. This gives you a chance to talk to your prospective customers and clients directly and for them to become familiar with you as a source of expertise and knowledge, a way of building a relationship of trust and familiarity.

If you’re not familiar with podcasting, a good way to think about it is that it’s like listening to a radio show, either on your computer or by downloading it to a handheld device, like an iPod. The beauty of the podcast is that you’re not tied down to a particular time or schedule, you can listen when you want, walking the dog, driving the car or just relaxing at home.

Once created, your podcast can be hosted on the internet and your users can subscribe to it using a number of different services or just directly from your website. The most famous resource for podcasts is of course iTunes, with it’s massive library of free materials. Anyone can get their podcast listed on iTunes as long as it complies with a set of fairly simple guidelines, the trick is to make you’re podcast easy to find by using the correct categories and keywords (more of this later).

As part of my work with the band boyzone, we created a series of video interviews where the various members of the band spoke about the reasons for their separation in 2000 and why they have now come back together for a tour in 2008. By using video interviews we were able to deliver the correct message to fans and to convey the genuine emotions and motivations of the band. These interviews were then converted into a series of audio podcasts which are available for free subscription on iTunes and released a week after each of the video episodes appeared on the boyzonetour.tv web site. This has the effect of making the message available to a much wider audience of iTunes users, which in turn drives traffic back to the boyzone websites, where if the viewers are inspired and interested they can then buy tour tickets or merchandise.

Click here to subscribe to the boyzone podcast with iTunes

Although boyzone already have a very large fan base, the same principals apply to any small business or organization, in that you can deliver your message to a large audience of people and give them the information they require to decide whether to take further action.

I hope this is a useful introduction to podcasting and will go into more details about the actual techniques in later postings. Please let me have any feedback on any of the posts.

Search engine marketing is about becoming listed in important search engines like Google and Yahoo and also specific niche directories and search engines that will appeal to your audience. Having gained a listing you then want it to appear in a prominent position where your target audience will notice your message and take an action by clicking on it.

This process isn’t just about keywords and meta tags as is the common belief, it’s about everything that I want to talk about in this blog, like podcasting, blogging, social networking and more. In a nutshell, it’s all about content, content that’s useful to the people you want to reach and content that will help them to solve a problem.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the method used to achieve a listing in search engines and then to drive that listing to the highest possible ranking. This can be achieved by careful thought about the tagging of pages and words used in the content, but also relies on both inbound and outbound links from your content, and a number of other factors.

Alongside “free” seo techniques you might also run a search engine advertising campaign using applications like Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing. For these services you can set a monthly budget to spend on advertising and allow the application to determine how it is spent or override the settings and spend manually. The basic plan is that you choose a series of keywords and phrases to appeal to your audience and then bid against others who are using the same to have your ad appear.

As with all successful web marketing techniques, the way to reach your potential buyers is not to tell them how good you or your product is, but to provide for them information that they are looking for or a solution to their problem. The key to success in both the free and the paid for techniques is to think very carefully about the types of keywords and phrases that your target visitors will use when they are searching for an answer to their problem. Using very broad generic terms will not be likely to provide you with a high listing, so for example if you are supplying parts for classic motorcycles, the phrase “motorcycle parts” returns about 8,000,000 results in Google. Whereas “triumph motorcycle parts” brings us down to 235,000 listings and “1960 triumph 5TA Speed twin motorcycle parts” gets us to 138.

A useful technique is to think very carefully about each of your customers and potential customers and divide them into categories or types, then for each of these write a profile listing their likes and dislikes, their habits etc. From this you can start to build content and develop keywords that target these particular characters.