Have you ever wondered how some E-marketers are able to predict which markets will respond to certain keywords? Have you ever been mystified as to how some businesses can seemingly scoop up an entire community of Internet users before anyone else gets the chance?
Maybe those questions are a bit too complicated to answer right now, especially if you don’t have the basics down yet. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today– sticking to the basics.
First let’s look at some of the ways you might be pursuing your E-marketing:
- Website
- Email Blasts
- Search Engine “SEO”
- Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising
- Banner Ads and Non-Search Engine Ad Networks
- Social Networks (ie: MySpace and/or Facebook)
If you’ve only heard of two of the E-marketing technologies above that’s ok, I’m going to cover them all, starting with Websites.
Trust your web designer to design your website, not measure its success.
A website is (also spelled web site or Web site, is a “back-construction from the proper noun World Wide Web”) is technically speaking, “a well-organized collection of Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets hosted on one or more web servers accessible from the Internet.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website
We typically use websites to give our prospective customers and customers information about our company. So a lot of times we design a web page about our services, history, and other important information we think we want our customers to know about. Most people put their email address, a phone number, and maybe an address on the homepage of their website and that’s about the gist of it.
Unfortunately, despite what web designers often tell you about websites and web marketing, even if it looks really cool and real pretty, you are still making the first mistake– to listen to your web designer about something other than web design. The second mistake is not to have a real good understanding of who is visiting your website, how they found it, why they decided to come, and whether or not they are going to buy from you. These are usually not web designer concerns.
So if you haven’t guessed already, the first pointer about your website is not to fire your web designer, but to learn about all the different ways to use your website as a software tool for business and not just as a pretty brochure. Our second pointer is to read your web server log files, and if you don’t know how to do that, hire a good technically savvy E-marketing guy to do it for you.
You might be asking now, “how do I know if I found a technically savvy E-Marketing guy?” That’s simple, ask him if he could “grep all the google referrers out of a raw apache log.” If he says, “have your system administrator email me the log,” then you know you have a winner.
Written By Nestor Wheelock
Systems Architect and Client Support Guru
http://www.iDotMind.com
This article be freely shared non-commercially under the Creative Commons
Right And Wrong E-Marketing Methods — And Little Pointers That Will Increase Your Profits by iDotMind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
