Welcome to the 3rd and final part in this quick 3 part series on getting your first online business up and running as quickly as possible to make your first dollar online. At this point you should have your online business model nailed down and also have your website up and running on WordPress.
If you have made it to this point, congratulations. Most people never make it this far, they just continue dreaming and waiting for some miracle to come along, or the next big Internet Marketing product that will help them create their fortune. The truth is that we all work hard and the thing that separates those who succeed versus those that continue living life as they always have is their marketing abilities.
This is by far, the most important aspect of the entire online business process and why many call this business the Internet Marketing business. At the end of the day you can have the best ideas, the best looking site and the best products, but if no one knows you exist, it doesn’t really matter, does it.
Now we can’t cover every marketing tactic in a few hundred words, but we will go over some of the basics to start getting you traffic and build some momentum in your new online business. But before we get into traffic we need to talk about…
What You Are Selling
Before you can begin the marketing process, you need to decide what it is that you are marketing. In starting an online business there is an infinite number of ways to find products to sell and you should never be short on that end. For starters,
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for selling products online. And now we can move on to marketing that product.
Buying Traffic
The fastest way to get targeted traffic to your site is to buy it. Using the integrated targeting on many traffic buying solutions you can drive very specific people to your websites and offer your products and services to them. When you are first getting started you might want to try and buy PPC, or Pay-Per-Click traffic. The major pay-per-click networks you are going to want to start with are Facebook and Google AdWords.
Test the waters with these 2 networks and then you can choose to expand to larger media buys, CPV and banner ad buying on direct sites.
When buying traffic on Facebook and Google you can really start to see how much a unique visitor is worth to you and how often you can convert a visitor into a customer or an affiliate sale. Ensure that you are always watching your campaigns and tracking them thoroughly as you are paying for every click and this can add up quickly, especially when you are just starting getting your Internet Marketing business off the ground.
Leveraging OPA
This is one of our trademark tips to getting targeted traffic to your online business. With this strategy we are going to leverage an existing site and audience and provide extreme value to them. In exchange we will get a link back to our site that satisfied viewers can use to go to our site.
This strategy is a win-win for all 3 parties involved. For the site owner, they are getting great content that they can provide to their viewers without having to create it themselves. The audience is getting great content that is helping to solve their problems. And you are not only getting targeted traffic back to your website, but you are also getting a link which is great for long-term SEO (search engine optimization) value.
The easiest way to Leverage OPA is through effective guest posting, similar to what I am doing now by writing this series for BossStart. BossStart is getting great content, you are learning about creating an online business and in turn I will get some traffic, some new customers and a link back to my site. It’s a win-win-win for everyone.
SEO
Getting traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing is a great way to get traffic to your site. The idea here is to create content that is:
- Relevant to what customers in your niche are searching for
- Likely to be linked to by other people in the industry
The best way to do this is through effective keyword research. If you are just starting out, I suggest using Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool and Wonder Wheel to get your ideas for what people are searching for in your niche. As you grow and have a little bit of a budget, Market Samurai is an extremely powerful tool for keyword research, but also provides a high level of competitive research, available content, domain information and so much more.
After you know your keywords you need to optimize your site for these keywords. This is done through creating compelling, keyword rich content, adding keywords to your site titles and then going out and getting links that have anchor text for your main keywords.
SEO can be a complex beast, but if you are doing 2 things regularly – creating content and getting links – Google and the like will continue to send you good traffic.
Social Media
Social Media is another beast and can be truly effective as a marketing strategy as it has the ability for high visibility and to be passed around among social groups. Your focus on social media should be in 3 places when getting started:
Your goal when getting started is to allow your website visitors and customers to pass along your content and products via social media buttons on your site. I’m sure you’ve seen these as “Like This” or “Tweet This” buttons on some of your favorite sites. This is very easy to install through WordPress plugins and can be fully automated to where your visitor can click a button and the social text can be populated automatically.
Your next step is to create a Facebook Business Page, a Twitter account and a YouTube account. From here you need to network and find other like minded people. This can be done through searches or directories (WeFollow.com).
When using these social tools be sure to use it as a 2-way communication channel. Share interesting things happening in your business and reply to others that you can help out or answer to. This will ensure that you get maximum exposure and create goodwill in your marketplace.
Closing Thoughts
As we cross into 1500 words in this post, you should have some ideas on how to promote your new online business to people that you can truly help with your message and products.
As we finish out this series, I want to know your strategy. What are your goals? What is a marketing strategy that you are looking to use, or currently using, that you can share with everyone?
Thanks for checking out the series and I look forward to seeing some of your new sites and businesses up and running and creating the life you always wanted!
This post was written by Greg Rollett from Radically Ambitious. If you are interested in creating your first online business, learn more about the new DVD Greg has just released to help people get their first online business up and running.
