How to guide for online marketing beginners. How to get started marketing your business online.

I've been designing, hosting, optimizing and marketing websites since 1997, If you are looking for Internet Marketing Professional help to create a full online presence please feel free to give me a call at 507-536-9557.

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Online Marketing Guide

First and foremost, if you are a local business with a business location be sure to get listed on Google places and bing local. The account and service for both no charge.

Moving on,

Getting Started with Online Marketing

Things to try out?

Google Adwords is a great start for a small budget. If you are looking to test the waters you can call 507 536-9557 for a $100 Google Adwords credit and if you ever need help managing your online marketing just keep me in mind.
Landing pages, see how different content affects your conversion rates.
Promotions, giveaways and contests.
Spend smarter, not more.
Mobile marketing. Be sure to have a clean and easy to use mobile phone site before marketing to mobile phone users.

What is your competitor doing?

Any good marketing professional can tell you how much money your competitor is spending and give you a good idea on their ROI.
See what is working for your competitor(s) and do it better.

In my Internet marketing experience over the years, here are some things not to do,

Spending money before you know your target market audience. You should always have a good plan/marketing strategy in place to only display ads to legitimate potential clients.
Flying blind with an untested marketing campaign. You should always do at minimum a 1 week sample before committing your full budget to any online and in most cases offline marketing campaigns.
Marketing with facebook, bounce rate was in excess of 90% and average time on site was always less than 10 seconds in all cases. Here is a recent example:
compare that to the 60% organic bounce rate on the same site:
Spending your entire budget in once place. Never spend your entire budget in one place, many people make this mistake and results will very based on your business model. As some people will find better results with search ads, text or even banners other may find better results with video or audio ads.

If you should have any questions or are looking for an Internet marketing professional give me a call at 507 536-9557

What is bounce rate? Bounce rate means the browser who clicked the add did not take any other actions on your site. In most cases they clicked on the ad by mistake or they are fake clicks. Less is better, you should strive for 60% or less bounce rate.

What is time on site? Time on site is the amount of time a new browser spends viewing your website before they close the window or move on to another site. In most cases you should strive for a minimum 1 minute or 3 minutes average for ecommerce websites.

A little something about everything