5 Ways to Create an Effective Marketing Plan on the Internet for your Business

Brand Strategy

The temptation currently for businesses is to ramp up their internet marketing by getting their company out there through blogs, social media, videos and promotions on their website. Of course all of those things are important, but first you have to ask yourself; "who am I and what makes me unique from my competition?" Do I have a brand strategy that lays a foundation for all my marketing that will strengthen my ability to create the right solutions for my company? A focused branding is a vital start to sending out a consistent message and reaching your most valuable customers.

Website Design

Create a website design that works with your logo and that matches and stays consistent with your brand identity. To have a design that can be flexible and grow and change with your business you should look at using a quality CMS (Content Management System) website crafted around Joomla or Drupal. Using these new CMS designs will allow your website to deliver relevant content to your customers this is easily maintained by you.

SEO

Claim your online real estate and get high rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo. Have a website design that is "search engine friendly" containing relevant content for the robots, spiders and crawlers to load up on and bring back to their home database. Create each webpage to be focused on a few keywords per page instead of tryiing to load them all on one page. Good use of meta keyword tags, title tags, URL structure, site navigation, videos and internal links should be carefully thought out and executed.

Social Media

The way we do business is changing. Social media sites have a new way of connecting and communicating with others, about ourselves and our business. From social networks like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, there are many ways a business can participate.

Website Analytics

Why should you use Google Analytics for your business?

Google Analytics provides a detailed look at the perfomance of your website including page views, time onsite, city of origin and many other details that are important to your business. Google Analytics will give you all the information you need to make your business successful if you have clear goals set from the begining. You can't reach your goals unless you know what they are and can measure your progress towards them. All your SEO and marketing campaigns should begin with Google Analytics.