x
When designing a business website most businesses use the website more as a web brochure and less on marketing via the “search engines.” When I first designed my business website I must admit that I was using it as a brochure with no thought given to search engine optimization also referred to as “SEO.”
Instead of spending thousands of dollars at a printer to product a marketing brochure to hand out to clients and prospects; I handed them a business card that included my web URL address. Today my approach is different; I use my website to attract new business from search engine results and as a marketing brochure.
Internet Marketing can be used for all types of businesses from start ups to existing small to large businesses. Whether you are offering a service or selling a product you can greatly benefit from SEO.
This article will focus and begin a step by step process to help you along the way of optimizing, designing and the use of search engines to increase web traffic to your website.
To give you a better understanding of internet marketing and the impact on your business, start with a free online training course that will give you a broad overview of how to run your business online. This free online video course is titled “The Challenge” and has been offered annually over the past several years.
The course is available year long and updated each year. Each video lesson is less than 15 minutes and is accompanied by written text. Broken down into seven modules and further divided into seven days the lessons are bite size. Because the lessons are quite short and easy to understand you may wish to consider accelerating your learning pace. You could very easily manage one module a day and be finished in one week assuming you can devote an hour to two hours per day.
My recommendation is to first go through the entire seven modules as an overview and not worry about spending the time actually performing the exercises. This will save you time and later money if you discover you are not interested in building an online business.
When reviewing the seven modules (produced in 2010) the ones you should focus on and are extremely important are the following modules: 1, 2, 3, and 5, the others are what I consider filler.
The internet marketing course is free though they will introduce you to two major software products that being Market Samurai and WordPress Direct both offering free options and paid versions. My thoughts are to skip the paid versions for now, no need to be spending any money just yet. After taking the course I did purchase the Market Samurai software product shortly after the course concluded and a wise decision it was.
If you are in a hurry to sign up for a trial Market Samurai just click the provided link..
If you are ready to purchase Market Samurai just click the link to your left.
If you like to learn more about Market Samurai click this link.
Word of caution (money saving tip); once you sign up for Market Samurai (trial version) you will only be given five or so days to purchase if you wish the deep discount offered and the savings is substantial. Make sure you go through all the modules covering the product before signing up as not to waste money if you decide later not to proceed further. There are a lot of software, books, systems and training/mentor subscriptions that will drain your wallet that are either a scam, poorly written or just a waste of money which is most of them.
To date I have only purchased Market Samurai software and have used free content available from a variety of resources that I will share with you in later articles. Stay tuned as additional articles in a step by step fashion will follow soon.
A reminder: you can get into the online business for less than $300 the first year of operations by following these articles.
Coming soon: we will discuss domain names, web hosting and Market Samurai along with free SEO software and free internet marketing guide books.
Dan Iuculano
