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Here’s an article I wrote for the print version of a local newspaper The Westerner, intended as a primer for those just starting out in the confusing world of online marketing.

MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS ONLINE

How successful are your online marketing efforts lately? Are you getting a good return on investment from your web site?

To maximise your results you need a sound strategy based on three key elements. First, make sure you have a great product or service to market. If you don’t think highly of what you’re selling you probably need more than a marketing strategy at this stage anyhow.

The second element of the strategy is the getting found part. Your web site’s content must be written as much as possible to appeal to both of your key audiences - your human readers and prospective customers on the one hand, and search engines such as Google and Yahoo who find, index and rank the content of web sites for searchers on the other.

This is a tricky part of the online marketing process. You need your site to rank highly in the search engines to get visitors. But once you attract a visitor to your site, you still have to convert them into customers. This requires good web copywriting with a strong call to action - buy my product or service.

So to optimise for the search engines make sure your headings, sub-headings, page titles, meta and content tags and body copy all emphasise your target keywords. Gentle does it though, don’t just stuff your keywords into every heading and sentence, as this makes for a miserable reading experience for your viewers. Write as if you yourself were reading this as a potential customer with a genuine interest in finding out more about your product or service.

To rank well you also need to gather as many quality back links from other popular web sites to your own. Web directories, search engine listings, popular industry association and news sites, and authority sites like Wikipedia are all sources of valuable links. Search engines reward quality links from sites they consider to be authoritative with regards to your keywords. You get linked to by: begging, being newsworthy, becoming a regular contributor to popular forums and discussion boards, and regularly publishing fresh, informative content on your site.

Now its time to consolidate and maximise returns from your efforts so far. It makes sense to do everything you can to retain and nurture each new visitor you get, by giving them good reason to become repeat visitors - read customers - to your site.

That’s why the final part of your strategy is to find ways of capturing and building that return traffic organically, because that’s where your loyal, high-value online customers are to be found. There are many ways of achieving this growth, but all revolve around creating a high value experience in terms of online content and communications, and a focus on support and community for your customers online.

Great tools to help fulfill these goals include company blogs, community forums, product forums and wikis, webcasts and web presentations, web video and podcasts, opt-in email newsletters, online conferences, downloadable information papers and so on. In particular good, positive content contributed by your own customers posted on your site is gold for this purpose. Above all, be valuable.