Tips on Affordable Web Design
written by: bobbyd

Affordable Web design is a subjective topic simply because “affordable” is all relative to the type of web design you need. There are several options you should consider in order to get the lowest possible price for your web design project. It is important however to not sacrifice quality at the expense of getting your web design cheaper. There are many companies in your local area who most probably provide web design services at what can be considered to be a very affordable price. No longer are the days where you’re paying thousands for web design locally. Globalization has forced local web designers to reevaluate their pricing model and compete with the changing times.
Get Multiple Quotes
The best way to ensure you get web design at an affordable price is to get quotes from multiple companies based on your web design needs. Once you receive the quotes from the companies, you can evaluate the price ranges and eliminate the options where you feel are too expensive. You will then be left with a handful of quotes you can use to negotiate a better price with the company that you want to work with.
The Infrastructure of Your Website
If you’re looking for the most affordable web design solution, you may be better off looking at using a template or theme based off a popular content management system. With this option you can select a template / theme design from the thousands that already exists and customize it to your needs accordingly. Previously there was a requirement to get a template / theme to match the color scheme of your business. No longer is this the case as many content management systems and templates / themes are designed in a way to allow you to easily modify the main colors of the website.
Stay Within Budget
If you find a potential company to provide web design services when you feel that their pricing was out of your budget, consider being blunt with them and asking them if they could do the web design within the price you can afford to pay. Since the industry itself is so subjective, there is a lot of room for the companies to negotiate on pricing simply because the cost is often much less the actual price you are being quoted.
In summary, it’s not an easy process to find affordable web design. The ranges that exist within the industry are some of the largest compared to any other type of service. You will need to take the time and research in order to fine the right fit for you. Expect some surprising discrepancies among the companies you stumble upon. Understand the variables that go into their pricing are all based on what they think their time and expertise is worth as opposed to a common metric that industries typically all adhere to. On the positive side, The industry itself has taken a hit as a result of globalization and web design as a whole has dropped in price significantly. Affordable web design is almost guarantee as long as you take the time to research.

It has become essential for every company to have a website presence to effectively market their products and services. But if you run a business or an organization, then you must definitely have a website to create awareness about your services.

Creating a website does not have to be a very expensive process. You have a few affordable website design options. Even if you do not have the essential skills or the manpower to develop your website, you can always hire the services of a reputed design firm to do the job for you. However, you need to use a few important criteria to choose a good firm to do your website design work.

First of all, check to see that the company you are interested in has a long list of satisfied clients for whom they have already created websites. Go through their portfolio to see the quality of their work. Try to see whether they have done websites for companies that have similar products or services as your own company. That will give you an idea of how your website would turn out when they design one for you. So, get a good idea about their work before you decide to hire them to do your site.

Secondly, choose a company that offers affordable web design services. Back in the old days when the web was still in its infancy, many companies charged ridiculous prices for creating a website. However, the situation has changed drastically now. Affordable web design is very much available today, and you need to go for a company that provides its services at a reasonable cost.

Finally, choose a company that would provide a free quote for their web services. Some companies might not come out with their prices readily and you need to avoid such services. Go for a company that is transparent and is ready to give you a free quote for their services at the very outset.

There are many different website design services out there, but not all of them would be good enough for you. Some might be reputed companies but they might charge heavily for their services. Others might provide service at a reasonable cost, but their quality might be poor. Therefore use these simple criteria to choose a reputed firm for your web-design requirement that suits your budget. Select a company with a good portfolio, which can provide a free quote for an affordable web design service. That will help you strike a balance between cost and quality and get you a professional-looking website.

There are quite a number of Website Design companies out there so when you are seeking these types of services you are spoilt for choice. However, the challenge comes when it is time to pick just one among them all. There are things that you should always lookout for to ensure that you hire the best company for the job and no one else.
The first thing you should do is to check the company’s track record. Take a look at their portfolio and see what they have done in the past that is relevant to your situation. You can also ask the companies you are considering to give you testimonials or references from other customers they have worked for. Call up the clients and check that the testimonials are indeed real.
Look into the availability of the company as well. This is why it is also important to get a phone number from the agency so that you can call them up and check on their progress. Look into what their average turnaround time is in responding to any of your queries since you may need some urgent changes to be made at one point or the other and thus you have to get through to them quite easily and quickly.
Any Website Design agency has to have all the websites they work on coded with the best standard in the industry today. Find out if the websites they have designed meet all the required standards and the browsers they test their work in. There are a number of browsers on the internet today so it is important to ensure that your website can be viewed properly in all of them.
You should also analyze the staff and see if they are professional and approachable. This is important because they are the people who will be managing your account and you will get the best results if you are on friendly terms with them. The staff at the company should be interested in finding out more about your business and what you do so that they deliver exactly what you need.
Look into whether your project will be taken care of in-house or outsourced to another company. If t is going to be outsourced then you should find out where. Outsourcing may affect the quality of work done and you want to avoid this at all costs since you are after all paying for a quality job.
You should also always go with your gut feeling when selecting an affordable web design company. If they rub you the wrong way right from the beginning then it would be best to look for another service provider straight away. You should hire a company you feel completely comfortable with and confident in their abilities to deliver good results.
The Website Design company you choose to go with should also be reasonably priced. There is a lot of competition in the market among these companies so you will be able to get one at a reasonable rate. Just make sure that they do not compromise on the quality of work they do because you are paying less.

Internet marketing is one of the most powerful platforms for marketing for any business. More and more businesses are slowly embracing the power of the internet by investing in professional websites that endear their customers to them. A professional website is no longer meant for only large companies but can be used by small and medium sized companies to not only advertise themselves but also give information to potential clients.

Having a good website has never been as important in today’s changing world as it is nowadays. A quality website can not be left to multinational companies alone. Businesses are slowly embracing the need of a website in the day to day running of their activities. A well designed website does a lot in improving the online presence of business organizations and cannot be underestimated. It is therefore crucial for businesses to seek an affordable web design firm that can help them come up with quality sites.

Web design is an intricate process meant to come up with a suitable website for business. Web design creates quality websites for your business. The websites are tailor made to enable the overall visibility of the business online to your congregation thus making them a wear of important information. For a business organization, having an online presence is very important not only for the growth of the business but to also convey important messages to your customers. There are different proffesional firms that are willing to provide affordable web design services for businesses.

Many visitors to an area look for products and services online. A lot of people require information before they are able to make up their mind as to what product they need to buy. Shopping is no longer done the traditional way where people used to look for products and services in newspapers and the yellow pages. For businesses, websites provide the best way of putting as much information as possible on the internet so that people can make up their mind about becoming your customer.

The question on everybody’s mind then is how websites can help to improve your online presence? Well web design combines the experience needed to design quality websites and SEO optimization in order to ensure that your website is ranked highly in search engines. When potential visitors to your business search for you online, there are able to find you in order to get vital information about your business organization. Business organizations are very important in the world and should have an opportunity of attracting a lot of customers as possible.

Fortunately more and more businesses are embracing the need for a website in the day to day running of their activities. Not only does a website boost your reputation but also improves your online visibility in today’s competitive business world. Online visibility is perhaps one of the necessity for a thriving business.

Professional web design services have to ensure that critical elements needed to make the website functional are introduced in order to make it more effective. Every aspect of the website has tobe displayed in such a way that they are easy to view. It should also have a check out page which allows users to pay for the products in a secure manner without any fear of loosing their money. The internet is filled with firms that offer affordable web design therefore it is the best place to start.

If you know how to attract visitors to your website, there are various ways to convert that traffic into money. I always tell my clients to worry first about traffic and second about how to make money from that traffic. All too often I find sites and get clients who want to fill their sites with banner ads and other paid advertising without even getting their first visitor, this is definitely not the way you should approach Internet marketing.

One way to monetize your site is to promote affiliate products.

An affiliate product is a service or product that someone creates or supplies. In this method all you have to do is get your visitors to buy their products and services and you get a percentage of the sale.

This is how an affiliate product program works

1. You find an affiliate product.

Your first step is to find a product that you believe will be somehow easy to sell and that will pay you a fair amount for your efforts of referring customers to buy the product. Sites such as www.clickbank.com or Commision Juncion www.cj.com have plenty of affiliate products to promote and information on how much do they pay out per sale.

2. Access your unique affiliate link.

Some products will supply you with a working landing page that you can customize to your needs, or you could also create your own landing pages with a custom link to the checkout page.

3. Promote your Affiliate Product

This is where the fun begins, from SEO, to Paid Advertising and email marketing you need to drive tons of traffic to sell your affiliate products. This step is where you either make it or break it, if you can drive targeted traffic to a good product chances are you will make some sales and earn those commissions you worked so hard for.

Google Adsense Ads

Adsense is by far the most popular method of advertising on the Internet. Within a few clicks, the big G will supply you with a code that you can easily add to your site and instantly you can start making money once someone clicks on the ads on your website. www.google.com/adsense

Most adsense ads don’t normally produce large revenue for small websites with low traffic since most clicks will only earn you a couple of cents. The key to making a decent check from Google adsense is to have tons of traffic coming to your site.

The whole idea behind adsense is to drive your traffic to other websites. This is an important concept to understand since this is typically not a good idea if you want to use it in your local small business website or a site where you are selling your own products, since you will be sending your hard earn visitors to your competition.

Selling your own products and services

Last but not least you can monetize your site by offering your products and services. This is a route that many people decide to take since is the only one where you will be able to keep 100% of the revenue from your site. However selling your own products and services online can definitely prove to be the most challenging because it normally requires lots of time and preparation before you can start selling.

Information Products = When we talk about selling products and services most people automatically think about actual products, books, clothing, etc. Keep in mind that you can as well sell informational products such as e-books. Virtually anyone with a computer nowadays can use a word processing program to write a how-to e-book and then convert it to PDF, which can then be packaged to be downloaded online.

No matter how you decide to monetize your site keep in mind that traffic is the most important thing when it comes to only success. I always tell my clients if you have a site with targeted traffic it doesn’t matter how you decide to make money on it you will eventually start profiting from it.

Websites are never the same, do not be fooled any bit. There will always be those websites with perform better than others because of having the best affordable web design methods. Does your website receive the many hits you want it to? If not then chances are there is somewhere you are going wrong.

Avoid fancy images

Fancy images only come into a website if necessary. Often times the websites needing lots of fancy imaging are those dealing with video games and other entertainment options. If you are building a web design for a business company, then images have no business there unless the client requires them. Fancy images reduce the potential of clients taking your website seriously.

Use light graphics on the background

Web graphics are a great idea in stepping up web appeal. It allows you to play with colors and come up with an attractive background to get the web visitor interested. But here is a quick tip, always make sure the background graphics reflect the content on the front. It won’t add to sense if you maximized on graphics and drown the entire web content to oblivion. Even if your content is built from the best affordable SEO, if the graphics don’t highlight the content you may get lesser hits than required.

How to handle ads

Building a great web design feature always requires you to think ahead. Picture how your website will be running ads on the web once it goes live. You don’t want commotion all over the page with advertisements overshadowing the real content on the page. Make sure to include a small corner section of the webpage on your web design which will be used to post ads. Alternatively you can settle for pop-up windows which you can control how they appear on the webpage.

Keep it simple

We do understand that the competition for appealing websites is high so you could be under pressure to think even further from the box. However, there is no need of trying out a web design that online users wouldn’t find readable. They say there is power in simplicity so keep it straightforward and follow all the rules. Just use the right colors to come up with something appealing and make sure to use affordable SEO tips that can win you rankings on Google. So be simple, it will pay eventually at the end.

Have you heard of favicons?

You probably have seen one; this is a small graphic image that appears at the top of the browser page you are in. Gmail has that trademark red envelope or ‘G’ that always sits on the top part of the browser. What purpose do they serve? Online users can easily bookmark your site and remember it for future reference. Whenever they go through their bookmarks, your favicon will always pop up to greet them and they are sure to visit that page again. However, make sure your favicon is exact as your logo or it uses the same colors as your website theme to avoid confusions.

These tips are your survival key to web design and you can actually build a highly selling website from them.

by: Santiago Sosa

Even the  most beautiful website in the world won’t be able to convert a single visitor into a client unless the website is well written and has compelling content to entice the visitor and tells him to take immediate action.

Fortunately there are plenty of resources and examples of beautiful website copy that has been proven to sell. If you have been around the online marketing stratosphere for a while you have probably heard that content is king, this is true not only for search engine optimization, but for conversions as well.

Understanding Effective Website Copy

As you already know it is fairly simple to put up a blog or website on the internet nowadays, because of this most customers are very skeptic as to what they read on the net. As a website owner, you are responsible for gaining your customers trust and prove them that you are worth of earning their business and their hard earned money.

With all the autoblogs and guest posting that surrounds the internet today, it is very hard to identify robot generated content to unique website copy, it is highly important that you prove to your visitors that you are a real human being and that you are writing to them not because you want a spyder to rank you because of the keywords you embedded in your text.

A good way to personalize your user experience is to write in an informal, easy to understand way. Write your content just as if you were explaining your business to a colleague who is interested, don’t try to seem bigger than you are, and try to be as straightforward as possible.

Affordable Web Design

Add a good photo or video to your website: When presenting yourself on your new site it may be a good idea to show a picture of yourself or your team so prospect clients can put a face to the product or service you are offering. It has been proven that when a good photo is added to the sales copy of any website sales conversion tend to go up. With today’s technology is also fairly simple to record a high definition video to introduce yourself to your clients. Most smartphones and tablets have a decent camera that can shoot high definition video. If you’d like to add a touch of interactive video, dress up and put yourself in front of the camera and introduce your company to your prospective clients. Once you shoot the video you can easily edit it with software such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker and upload it to video sharing sites such as youtube or vimeo.

When it comes to selling products and services online you should focus less on the features and more on the benefits that you can provide your potential customers. Here are some ideas to help you gain your customers trust:

Use testimonials on your sales copy: Prospect customers like to know that you have happy clients who use your products and services. Try to get a couple of your current clients to write a short testimonial and tell them if it is ok to use it on the website. Another very effective way is to have a couple of your customers send you an audio or video testimonial talking about how happy they are about using your company.

Provide clear calls to action

Probably one of the most important things when creating a website is to have clear calls to action on every page. Simply think if a customer lands on any of your pages what is it that you want them to do. Here are some pointers on how to make a clear call to action:

-          Display your phone number in an easy to find location of the web page.

-          Use different size and colors to emphasize important links in your website content

-          Put a form on all pages where visitors can input their comments and questions

-          Try to reduce distractions on your site

The main purpose of a small business website is to give your potential clients the information and products they are looking for. As a Web Designer I will tell you that the design plays an important role to establishing your brand online, but even with the best design is all about your offer.

There are many web design techniques that will help you enhance the experience of your visitors. In today’s environment there is a lot of clutter with advertising and potential clients can get distracted very easily, it is important to find your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and clearly present it to your clients in a way that is easy for them to understand. This is where basic design elements such as graphics, colors, and fonts and so on play an important role on any web design. The decision is yours to make, you can elect to have the cool flash site with a lot going on or a simple yet effective site that will help you increase your revenue.

How to Brand your website

Most marketing experts agree that branding plays a huge role in a company’s success. If you look at the big names such as McDonalds, Microsoft, Ford, Coca Cola and plenty of other big companies have achieve a brand recognition by the general public, that most of us will recognize their name even if we were shown just the first letter on their logo.

Branding is one of those simple concepts to understand yet very difficult to implement. Most large companies spend a ton of money creating their branding strategies. Luckily for small business if you are clear on the image that you want your customers to perceive, with a few well thought out strategies you can create that perfect branding for your business.

First take a minute to think about how you want your customers to perceive your company, is it high end or more value driven, do you want to be formal and very serious, or you prefer a more informal look and feel. These questions can help you decide how to build the perfect brand.

The Following elements will help you establish your brand online.

Taglines and Slogans

As you might already know taglines and slogans are short phrases that describe your business in just a few words. Here is a list of some of the most famous slogans (http://www.scribd.com/doc/11748/Famous-Brand-Slogans); such as Burger King – Have it your way, DHL – We keep your promises, Microsoft – Where do you want to go today? among others.

When working in your branding think about a good catchy slogan before you work on your logo as you’d probably want to incorporate your slogan in your logo design.

You can use http://rhymezone.com to find words that rhyme for your slogan.

The perfect logo for your brand

Many small businesses overlook the importance of a well-designed logo. Chances are that for most of your clients this will be the first thing they will see when they visit you. A logo can represent your entire branding image in just a small graphic; your logo can easily portray what your business is all about. You can choose to have a funny, energetic design or an elegant contemporary design that shows your clients that you offer quality services and products.

When customers see your logo they can evaluate in an instant how professional you are, your creativity, your attention to detail and more.

Take a quick moment and visit www.logopond.com/ and see how without even knowing the company for each logo, how you can picture an image of what they stand for. This website is a great galley for inspiration as well.

The importance of creating a consistent look

I can’t stress enough how important is to keep a consistent look on all of your marketing. When creating your website make sure that the design is coherent and flows right. Here are some important points to have in mind when creating your website

• Always try to have your text against a white background. Even if you have a color background website you can always boxed the text so it will be easier on your readers’ eyes.
• Never try to match more than 3 or 4 colors on your website, these colors should have been already selected when creating your logo.
  • When looking for different colors that go well together try http://www.colourlovers.com/
  • Do not try to overdo your website with many images, videos and music, this makes website slow, hard to look at and most people will just click away.
  • Because of how many people search on mobile devices nowadays try to stay away from flash on your sites.

When you are getting ready to embark in your web design quest many questions will arise, as I explained before (in our last article Online Marketing Basics for Small Business) your website strategy has to be well thought out and planed. Create your website strategy with the same detail and attention as your business or marketing plan, after all if you do it right it might become a big part of those plans.

I always like to tell my customers that before you put any ideas together for your website, think about who do you want to reach? Take a quick minute and imagine you have just met your “perfect” customer, how does he/she look like? Is he an older retired man or is she a 19 year old college freshman? Economic status? Well educated? All of these demographics can help you think about who will visit your site and will ensure that you design the site for them (your target client) not designed based on your own preferences; just because your favorite color is green and you are still in love with the font comic sans does not mean that you should use that on your site, unless you are 100% positive that your target audience loves the same.

Tips for defining your target audience and how to analyze your competition

Most small business owners start their operations by creating their products and services and then try to find who their audience is. This is definitely not what you want to do when you are planning your new website. Make sure you always determine who your potential customers will be and then analyze your competitors so you can create better products and services tailored to your customers’ needs.

There are plenty of sites where you can do your diligent research to find this information.

Google keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool

The Google keyword tool lets you analyze how competitive and popular search terms are. Just put in some keywords related to your business and Google will tell you how difficult it is to rank on their search engine and how many people search those terms every month.

Analyze your competition

Run a Google search for some keywords related to your business and analyze the first 3 to 5 sites. Look for design elements, content, calls to action and more. Chances are if they rank well on the big G they must be doing something right. Be in the lookout for things that you can either do differently or how to improve them.

Tools to analyze and spy your competition

- Websitegrader.com
- Quantcast.com
- Alexa.com

These 3 tools will give you plenty of information about your competition; all three analyze different information such as traffic, age of site, demographics, social media and more. Review this information to see how your new site can offer something different for potential clients and what online marketing strategies you can use to overtake your competition.

Quick note: Don’t get frustrated if you see that your competition has thousands of links and hundreds of followers in their social media sites, if you put in the time and effort with time you can compete for a piece of the pie.

Determine your website goals

After you have defined your target market and analyzed your competition you should start setting up goals for your new website. Remember to always have realistic goals, but make sure that you have goals and objectives that will make you work hard and effectively. Some ideas for website goal setting are

- How many sales do i need to have per month for my website to grow?

- How many visitors, subscribers and customers do you need each month to attain those sales?

- Where does my site need to be in the search engines to attain those sales goals?

- Define actual financial goals: how much do you see making a year, quarter, monthly and daily.

Put all of these goals in writing, I guarantee it will make it much easier to keep track of them and will help you keep track of them as you create your online campaigns.

Determine how much to spend in building traffic to your site

Once you have the projected sales goals you need to determine how much traffic you will need to accomplish those goals. The next logical step is to determine how much you can afford every month to allocate in traffic building campaigns, such as search engine optimization SEO, paid advertising campaigns, social media, etc.

Say that on average your website can convert 5% of the visitors into paying customers, based on this numbers you will need 1000 visitors to make 50 sales, depending on how much you make on every sale you will need to determine how many people needs to see your site on a daily basis in order to accomplish your goals. This will give you a better idea on how to allocate your online marketing time and budget, you could spend 20% on paid advertising such as Google Adwords and Facebook ads, 50% on SEO, 10% on social media and 20% in offline marketing for your site.

Keep in mind that there are plenty of avenues for promoting your business online; every single one of them is unique. As a busy small business owner is impossible to keep track of all online marketing technologies and strategies. Analyze your strengths and weaknesses and find experts whenever you see it needed.

Here are some of the different methods that you should be using to advertise your website online.

Website design
Content creation
Article Marketing
Blogging
Website updates
Graphic design
Seo
Social media
Paid advertising
Online Video Marketing
Press Releases

Each one of these has many different variables and it will be hard to say that someone could be a master in all of them.

Fortunately there are experts on which you can rely to help you with all of these tasks at affordable prices.

Author: Santiago Sosa

As you might remember not so long ago we had internet connections via a telephone line, we happily browsed our favorite websites waiting oftentimes a couple of minutes for images and long paragraphs with funky fonts and colors to load. Back in those days we did not have many options, for most people the idea of buying online seemed like a 70′s sci-fi movie.

Because of the high costs associated with creating a website in the early ages of the internet, this was a luxury item of larger companies; it almost felt more as status symbol.  Nowadays as you already know many things have changed.

Today your website is probably one of the best sales tools your business can have, here’s why

It’s your best lead generation tool: in today’s market even the smaller companies can compete against the largest companies in the world for potential customers

It’s your most cost effective sales tool: forget newspapers, yellow books and old media, websites can take orders, accept new customers and much more 24/7 without having to have anyone waiting on the phone to take an order

It’s a fast marketing testing tool: with a click of a button you can change products name, prices, pictures, copy and much more to see what appeals more to your customers, “good luck trying that with a catalogue”

It’s your own retailer and sales person: setting up an e-commerce website today is not only easy but affordable, your website can take orders, payments and automatic process the orders and shipping if needed

Understanding online marketing and its process

Yes, your website is probably one of the most important assets in your online marketing efforts, however its far from being the only thing you need when creating an internet marketing campaign. Most small business make the mistake of believing that by just putting a 5 page catalog website together on the web will bring all the customers they had been waiting for. In today’s competitive marketplace this will rarely ever do anything for your company.

If you want to create a successful marketing campaign you have to create and follow a step by step process to run and grow your business online.

Step 1: Take charge and be consistent

You can achieve online marketing success if you put the time and dedication to educate yourself about the different online marketing strategies and take charge of your online efforts. If you put up a website, Facebook page and twitter account just to leave it alone and never come back to it, failure will soon follow you and most people blame some obscure evil internet god, where you think you got too late into the game, that you are not a 22 year old Harvard genius or that you are just unlucky. Believe me many people go through this, only to come back years later regretting all the success they would have had accomplished if they only had stuck with it.

Your online marketing needs a great image: starting from the colors you choose for your logo and the font you use in your website, your online marketing message has to be clear. Remember will all the clutter that most people see on the media everyday oftentimes less is more. Forget the flying color letters and loud funky music on your website, chances are its just going to get mixed with the sweet soft online radio station of your customer and you just made her close her browser as fast as she could. Remember to put the same creative elements on all your marketing materials as you do in your website so you can create what is called a business brand.

All about hosting and domains: today millions of domains are registered every day it’s not as easy as it used to be to find a good domain name for your business, keep in mind that there are many different online marketing strategies that can be improved by having a good domain name for example if you have a domain that includes the correct keywords for your business this will eventually help you with your search engine optimization efforts. Also keep in mind that hosting is very affordable nowadays back in the day I remember having friends pay over $50 a month for basic hosting service. Today you can get a great hosting service with all the necessary tools for your website at a low monthly cost.

Step 2: Establish your online brand

Website design: Don’t be fooled by some of the larger companies that tell you that web design is an obscure world of code wizards and design goddesses. With the advances in today’s online technologies is fairly affordable to have a great and effective website designed. Don’t take me wrong, I’m not saying find your 17 year old nephew to design your website as I’ve seen before, or to go to craigslist and find that $20 web designer that will create your online masterpiece, this will shortly result in online marketing failure. All I’m saying is that you don’t have to spend 5 or 7 thousand dollars to get a very effective and appealing website.

It’s all on the content: Don’t follow the same error of many small business owners when they start creating a website where they put all the time and energy finding the right colors, the perfect logo on all the awesome images for the website but they neglect to create the best copy and content for their customers to read, after all most people go online to find useful information. Not only this but shortly when you discover the wonders of search engine optimization you will rapidly find that the content on your website is a key factor in your online marketing efforts. If you don’t feel as creative as you were in your junior high poetry writing class, i highly recommend finding someone who can help you create compelling content for your site.

Communicate your offer: Many companies get distracted and use their website as a tri-fold brochure. Make sure you find the single reason why someone will visit your site and clearly give your visitors what you have to offer. It could be a simple contact form for more information, a sales video or a well put together sales page with an integrated online payment, whatever it is make sure you clearly tell your prospective customers what you offer and what action you want them to take.

Step 3: Build your audience

I could literally write 10 books in this subject and will definitely give you more detailed information later on, but this is how some say “where the magic happens”, here is where you could give up to have the best designed website, all the social media pages in the world and so forth if no one is finding you online there is just no point of losing your precious time and money on these internet adventures. Traffic=customers=sales

Search engine optimization: SEO or search engine optimization is probably one of the most important pieces of the online marketing puzzle. This is where if done correctly can take your business from a small pop and mom corner shop to a large online retailer. Basically millions of people search every day for services and products online trough search engines, SEO is what helps you beat the competition so more people will find you.

Social media: If by now you don’t know what Facebook or twitter is you must have been living under a rock for the past 5 years. As you know today almost everyone is connected online with their friends, family and colleagues trough some social media site. You need to take advantage of this by creating a social media campaign, just as I explained earlier about web design, you won’t do much by just putting up a Facebook or Google+ profile, you have to create a strategy to reach all those potential customers with which you can easily interact online.

Paid online advertising: Just as important as some other online marketing methods paid online ads can be a very effective sales tool. Between Google Adwords, Facebook and banner ads there are plenty of companies looking for you to spend your beloved dollars advertising with them, make sure that before you take your shiny credit card out of your wallet you analyze and understand where your money is going and how is it going to help your online marketing efforts.

There are plenty of other online marketing strategies to follow, for now I wanted to cover some of the most important basics that will hopefully guide you on the right direction. Please keep tuned for more tips and information to help you create or enhance your small business online marketing campaigns.

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