Whether you’re getting ready to launch your website or internet business, or if you’ve already launched your site, you need an internet marketing plan. As the saying goes, without marketing, something bad happens: nothing! Without marketing, you’re not going to make a penny!

In this article, I’ll assume that you already have a website setup to market your product or service, and you need to attract and convert customers to your website. I’ll also assume that your website is user friendly, with good sales copy and easy to order from.

The first step in marketing is to identify your target customers. Who are your customers? How old are they? What gender are they? What websites do they visit? What do they search for on the search engines when they are looking for your product or service?

When you first start out, you’ll have to make educated guesses about much of this information, but as you go on, you’ll start to get data you can use to answer the questions more accurately.

Let’s assume that you’re selling video games. Your prospective customers are probably largely young males. You can be pretty certain that they are visiting other sites about video games, computers and such. As for search terms, they are probably searching for things like “buy video games” or the name of the game they want to buy.

Now that you have a picture of your customer, it’s time to get these prospective buyers to visit your site and make a purchase. Following are several proven marketing methods that are great methods to start marketing your site with.

Press Release

Submit a press release about your site. Spend some time writing the release so that it is unique, newsworthy, and not just an ad for your website.

PPC Campaign

Start a small pay per click search engine advertising campaign. This is an excellent way to get immediate qualified traffic to your site. Start small, and increase your campaign as you track results and know what is working. Google Adwords, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN are all good search engines to advertise with.

Search Engine Optimization

Choose several low competition keyword phrases that will bring you quality visitors, and optimize your site for them. Choose the most targeted phrases that you can.

Link Building

Building links to your website will bring you some traffic, but its main benefit is increased search engine rankings. Free directory submissions are an excellent way to build links to your site – there are hundreds of directories that accept free submissions. Just be patient, as it may take awhile before your submissions are accepted.

Article submissions are another great way to build quality backlinks. Write an article related to your industry, or pay a ghost writer to do it for you. You can then submit the article to article sites yourself, or pay someone to do it.

Link exchanges are still a good way to get links, too. Doing 3 way link exchanges are even better, though. Focus on linking with sites related to your keywords.

Everyone knows the Internet is growing exponentially and continually evolving. The major players in the continual evolution of the Internet are the major search engines and consumer generated media such as blogs. Because of the continual changes, a well rounded Internet marketing strategy must include a variety of proven marketing options to ensure success. I will outline 3 of the most effective Internet marketing solutions available and how they relate to your marketing strategy.

SEO Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the first because the free advertising afforded by the search engines is partly determined by on-page optimization techniques. With thousands of new Websites being created daily, the competition for a listing on the first search result page is increasingly saturated for the popular keywords. Statistics show better than 75% of people only look at the first search result page, and a similar percentage only click on the top search listing.

In order to compete effectively, a Web page must be designed around a keyword or more effectively, a keyword phrase. The keywords should be included in the page’s title, keyword META tag, page’s description, the first heading (using the H1 HTML tag), throughout the body of the page and within the last 25 words on the page. These are just a few of the basic SEO on-page options that although will not guarantee a first page listing, are definitely required as a starting point in an effective Internet marketing strategy.

In most cases, there is too much competition for certain keywords such as “golf clubs”. A better strategy would be to use “golf clubs Chicago” or “handcrafted golf clubs”. The more specific you make your keyword phrase the better. A number of free tools are available that will show the popularity of keywords and how often they are used in the search engines on a monthly basis. These will allow you to customize your Web page knowing the keyword phrase’s popularity. If you get the first page listing for a keyword with less than 100 searches per month for instance, then it doesn’t matter because your traffic will be very limited.

Link Exchanges

Once the on-page optimizations are complete, the off-page optimization options need to be addressed. Link exchanges are perhaps the best off-page SEO technique available. Google uses an algorithm to determine a page’s rank, which is determined by the number of other sites linking to it; and the QUALITY of the link is a major consideration. Pages are ranked from 1 to 10. The higher the PageRank of the site linking to yours, the better. Sites with a PR7 and above are considered as authority sites and a back link from them will send Google’s spider to your page on a regular basis.

There are a number of ways to get a back link to your site. You can email a request to the Webmaster for a link exchange. If they agree, you would return the favor by placing a link to their site on your page. You can also purchase the link. A number of sites offer this service for a monthly fee. So if you want to quickly get your site listed by Google and the major search engines, then paying for a PR8 back link for a month or two might be well worth the investment in the long run; as new sites are placed in a “sand box” by Google for several months until they prove their longevity.

One back link from a PR8 site is worth hundreds of back links from PR2 or less sites. As a matter of fact, numerous links from low ranking sites will actually be detrimental to your site. Each back link is like a vote for your site. If you have too many low ranking sites voting for yours, Google will be reluctant to reward your site with a higher PR. You have to do your research on the site that offers to link to yours because if they were blacklisted by Google, your site will receive the same fate and you probably will never recover from this.

A PR 4 or 5 is relatively easy to attain. So your best bet is to limit your back links to PR5 and above for the best results. And by all means avoid link farms. Before Google upgraded its algorithm, just the number of back links was considered. But now the actual PageRank of your back link is considered AND the PageRank of the sites linking to THAT page. Links from link farms are now looked upon as basically spam links. You would be better off purchasing a listing in a major link directory like Yahoo or DMOZ. It’s definitely worth the investment as these are authority sites and are a major vote for your site!

Many people running home based businesses are using the wrong types of advertising to advertise their businesses. This is the main reason most people are failing to earn any type of money online or offline. Most people have no clue how to market for their business. They end up using ineffective advertising techniques and end up quitting due to no money being made. Many companies have poor training and teach no solid marketing techniques. Many people are left out to hang and end up losing money, due to not having any marketing skills or training. This is the fundamental flaw with all businesses, a majority of business owners have no idea how to get more customers in their front door.

Many home based business owners are using ineffective advertising techniques. Many of these advertising techniques will end up costing them money and will end up giving them very few results, if any. Let’s take a look at some of the advertising techniques which are truly ineffective.

First many people are using classified ads to try and build their businesses. This is very ineffective and this form of advertising can end up costing you big bucks. Everyone and I mean everyone is posting their business opportunities to classified ad sites. Why does everyone post to these sites? Simple, it is simple to post to these sites and hope someone sees your ad amongst the other thousand of business opportunity ads there.

Next people are using traffic exchanges to try and advertise for their home based businesses. Traffic exchanges are even worse places to use than classified ad sites. Traffic exchanges are a complete waste of time and are not worth your time or money.

Lastly many people are trying to use banners to advertise their business. This is also another ineffective way to build your business. Banner ads rarely get clicked on. Using banner ads is just another example of your money going down the drain.

What you will find in common with all of these forms of advertising is they do not work and they are highly oversaturated. You will find many people using these techniques to try and build their businesses. You will also find about 99 percent of all people trying to advertise using these methods, have no marketing experience what so ever.

Now if you are truly looking to build a business, you will have to work or have the bankroll to hire specialists to run your business for you. There is no quick fix, building a business will either cost you money or time. Here are a couple of suggestions on advertising anyone can use to build their business. First writing articles and press releases is a highly effective way to build your business. This is free advertising. The key when writing articles and press releases is to write daily. Many people will write one or two articles a month and give up thinking it doesn’t work. But you must at least write 7 to 10 articles a week to be effective.

Using Pay Per Click advertising is also an effective way to advertise your business. But you must at least have a budget of $1,000 per month to be effective. It also helps if you or someone you know, knows what they are doing. It can get a little tricky when first starting out.

If you take anything out of this article you must remember your marketing campaign is the life of your business. Without solid advertising you are doomed to fail. With solid advertising for your home based businesses you can and will make a lot of money.