- Rise early.

- Be abstemious.

- Be frugal.

- Attend to your own business and never trust it to another.

- Be not afraid to work, and diligently, too, with your own hands.

- Treat every one with civility and respect.

- Good manners insure success.

- Accomplish what you undertake.

- Decide, then persevere.

- Diligence and industry overcome all difficulties.

- Never postpone till tomorrow what can be done today.

- Never anticipate wealth from any source but labor.

- Honesty is not only the best policy, but the only policy.

- Commence at the first round and keep climbing.

- Make your word as good as your bond.

- Seek knowledge to plan, enterprise to execute, honesty to govern all.

- Never overtrade.

- Never give too large credit.

- Time is money.

- Make few promises.

- Keep your secrets.

- Live within your income.

- Sobriety above all things…

- Luck is a word that does not apply to a successful man.

- Not too much caution-slow but sure is the thing.

- The highest monuments are built piece by piece.

- Step by step we mount the pyramids.

- Self-confidence, self-reliance is your capital.

- Your conscience the best monitor.

- Never be over-sanguine, but do not underestimate your own abilities.

- Don’t be discouraged.

- The best letter of introduction is your own energy.

- Lean on yourself when you walk.

- Keep good company.

- Keep out of politics.

E. MONITORING THE RESULTS

In the online world the main objective of publicity campaign is to gain as much quality traffic as you can. Consequently you need to weigh up the results by measuring quality and quantity of the traffic.

Very often the server who hosts your site is able to display for you the number of visits that have been made to your site at an additional charge. In the case of this service not being available (e.g. your site is on a free server) there are companies that offer monitoring services of the volume of traffic (free or paid) Sitemeter, Counter.

Quantitative measurement of the traffic refers to obtaining the following information:
  - Number of visitors
  - Number of visualized pages
  - Number of pages seen by any visitor
  - Duration of the visit

Qualitative information is various and could serve as the source of information for improving your site.

You can therefore obtain information about :
  - Nationality of visitors
  - The operating system
  - The resolution and information about the colours of the monitor-the layout of your site could be modified to be visualized by your visitors
  - The used browser (inclusive version of the programme)
  - The possibility of visualizing pages that contain: JavaScript, DHTML, Flash, Shockwave etc. -a high percentage of visitors who have not activated Flash plugin will not use this technology.
  - The access way on the site- we can know if our visitors have found our address with the help of the search engine (which key word was used), or whether the visitor found us with the help of an other site or through a publicity banner etc.
  - The in and out pages we find which pages are the most attractive and which make the visitor leave the site (being boring or having too many external links).

The data obtained in this way could be worked through with the help of specialized programs (server log analyzers) in order to obtain significant and useful information. These programs can offer you important conclusions about the visitors profile and ways the design of your site could be improved. In general a server will only give data not worked out, the monitoring companies offer reports that are more or less graphic.

In the same way starting from traffic already registered, some programs give forecasts e.g. site meter, starting with the ordinary, weekly, monthly and annual traffic produces forecasts for the following period.

- end of marketing plan article series-

Build an Internet Marketing Plan – Part 3

D. DEVELOPING STRATEGIES FOR ACHIEVING THE OBJECTIVES (part2)

Link Exchange

An important technique for promotion consists of having multiple links from other sites to your own. Well placed links can generate more traffic than the search engines.

Most people will not display your banner on their page simply because you asked them to. They will also ask you to have a link with their site on yours.

You must not be afraid if you loose clients who visit your site. They will come and go. You can not change this fact. If the content of your site is will not loose attractive they will come back. The link exchange will provide you with more traffic not less.

Competitions

One of the most simple and efficient methods of gaining the attention of people is to sponsor a competition. People love competitions and free offers. Your cost will be only to spend a little money for a weekly prize and the time needed to organize the competition. A competition will gain the attention of two categories of people: those who love the competitions and those who search for the free offers. There are two types of competitions: ability competitions and the drawing of lots.

If you organize a simple drawing of lots you will gain the attention of the people mentioned in the second category. What is it more important? These people will probably never come back to your site.

The ability competitions that offer a prize to the best entry will gain the attention of the people included in both categories.

Newsletter

Specialists within the industry of advertising found that a client needs to see an advertisement many times before they will act in accordance with it. It differs from a website. On a website you hope to have a high percentage of repeated visits but a newsletter is periodically sent to your potential clients.

What is a newsletter? It is an electronic publication that is usually sent periodically and contains different information about a certain service. Different names used on the Internet for a newsletter are ezine, Internet newsletter, webzine etc.

A newsletter is similar to a printed publication sent by post, the differences between the two ways of sending the newsletters demonstrates some of the advantages of using the Internet:
  - A newsletter sent by electronic mail does not need stamps or other cost for its distribution.
  - A newsletter can be globally distributed. It does not matter where the receiver lives.
  - The sending of a newsletter is practically instantaneous.
  - Costs for typing the publication do not exist.

Charged Publicity

It is easy to see that the marketing tools described above are relatively low in cost and easy to achieve. When your objective is to gain a large number of visitors and your company name to be in many peoples minds, you will be required to pay well known sites that have a large amount of traffic to display graphic links to your site. There are some widely recognized forms of charged publicity:

Publicity Banners

They are the most widely known and are graphic files having standardized dimensions, whether animated or not, they have a link to your site displayed on a web page. Usually the costs are calculated in relation to the number of times your banner is displayed (cost for displaying 1000 times). The cost could vary between 1-10 USD on general interest sites to 35-50 USD for specialized sites. Banners which are displayed in the search engines after a key word is typed cost 20-30 USD per 1000.

Another form of cost is CPC (cost per click)

To be easily noticed amongst a lot of other names some… offer preferencial displays for which you have to pay (Yahoo!) some others list the sites and charge only a tax for this service (e.g lists of shops: Lycos shop)

PPS Publicity (pay-per-sale)

The businessman gains associates who place graphic links on their sites to the businessman’s. When a sale is completed for a client who visited the site of an associate, the associate will receive 10-15% of the transaction value. This is a very efficient promotional method because it does not need to be paid unless a sale takes place. Amazon.com is one of the well know practitioners of this form of publicity.

Viral Marketing

There have been recent discussions on the Internet about the viral marketing. It is possible for you to have used it without knowing. Viral marketing is an online promoting method where the publicity message is sent from one person to another without the promoters being directly involved. The name comes from the way a virus is spread, it multiplies on numerous levels as the email is passed on. Lets suppose that at a specific time you are very impressed by the quality and utility of information from an electronic publication that you recommend it to your friends too. As a result many of them will decide to subscribe. Later they might recommend it to their friends and so on. Even though there is a very small amount of sites that succeed. This is due to the inferiority of the products they provide or the prices are too high.

- To be continued… - Go to Part 4

Build an Internet Marketing Plan – Part 2

D. DEVELOPING STRATEGIES FOR ACHIEVING THE OBJECTIVES  (part1)

After defining the objectives you want to achieve you need to think about a strategic plan of how to put them into practice. The methods of promotion you could find on the Internet are:

Free advertising

About free and paid advertising and site traffic I can write a book, but few ideas are here…
- Join other professional social networking sites and tell your story there. The best I found: Apsense, Lazzeo, Bizpreneur, Ojeez.
- Check HUGE social networking sites, such as MySpace
- Write articles on Associate Digest Article Directory
- Publish lenses about your new product or site by free subscribing to Squidoo
- Write a review for your site or product
- Use Web 2.0 technology (Technocraty, Digg, Delicio.us, StumbleUpon, etc.) and put widgets on your site.
- Write daily blog articles about your site events and changes on social networking site blogs or on your personal free blog (from Blogger.com).
- Use the power of FREE RSS and FREE press release.
- Traffic exchange is a very low speed, so I don’t recommend it, but who has time to stay at the desktop non-stop, can use it also!

Search engines

The first tools are the search engines. A lot of sites and blogs receive over 95% of traffic from search engines. This percentage is probably so big due to the fact that many people have not found an alternative to promote their business on the Internet.

The title of your site is the first thing that a potential customer will see, the key words give the search engines the necessary information to discover where to place your site in their database, and the description you use is similar to an advertisement in a newspaper.

Title
The main objective of the title is to describe in a correct way the content of your site. Choose three key words and use them in the title but be sure that the title has a meaning and offers to the reader a reason to visit your site.

Keywords
The way you choose the key words is not only important for gaining an excellent position in the search engines but you want to be sure your potential customers will be among the right clientele.

Email lists

One of the promoting methods of a site is to build a database of the addresses of potential clients interested in your offer and services. A prerequisite for gaining respect in the Internet world is to apply voluntarily to be included in this database through personal choice. The practice of sending unsolicited commercial emails (spam) is not only damaging to the image of your company but in certain countries could be illegal. It does not make any difference to the management of the list, what is essential is that the potential subscribers know they can stop subscribing at any point. In any message to your subscribers we recommend you present an option for them to leave.

Newsgroups

There are two methods to use the newsgroups for promotion and both of them are equally powerful.
This is the most common method to promote a site with the help of the newsgroups. It consists of writing an advert and sending it to all the subscribers of a certain newsgroup. But most of the newsgroups do not agree with this method of promotion. The general rules say that in a newsgroup one can only post messages that have appropriate thematic content respective to that group. There are some newsgroups that are open to this kind of publicity and most of them are dedicated to businesses.

Online contacts

Another way to enlarge your presence in the newsgroups consists of an indirect action: to take part in the discussions within the newsgroups. There are two techniques to use this method: using the signatures and searching for potential clients.
Using the signatures is a very easy method and at the same time very efficient. At the end of your message include a short description of your business. Do not forget to include the address of your web-site and your email address and your telephone number. Searching for potential clients is an extremely powerful technique it consists of searching within the newsgroups for people who might be interested in the services and products you offer.

Banner Exchange

A lot of sites receive an increase of their traffic due to the Banner Exchange service. Such a service allows the owners of different sites to reciprocate banners for presentation. A Banner Exchange will place your banner randomly on the page of another site that is a member of the same service. As part of the service you are required to display the banner of the Banner Exchange on your own site. Some services have a display rate of 2:1 of your banner (for every 2 banners displayed on your site 1 of yours will be displayed on another). There are services that have a display rate of 1:1.

What makes this service attractive is the possibility that your site may receive traffic from them straight away. Also they keep account of the number of different banners displayed.

- To be continued… - Go to Part 3