A website without a strategy is like driving through the jungle without a road to follow – you’re bound to get lost before you get very far! After all, there is a reason for every website’s existence – whether it’s revenue or awareness – that justifies its existence. Defining the reason for creating your website is part of your business plan.

Recent European surveys have shown that top management in many large enterprises lack a clear e-commerce strategy. The majority of top managers are unable to make use of the online channel. Do you belong to that group? Read on to see if you are getting the most out of your Internet Marketing Strategy.

1. Monitor and measure

The most important part of an Internet Marketing Strategy is to implement tools that visualize your results and enable you to improve your website, products and services. If used correctly, measurement tools and techniques allow you to act on the results, instead of getting swamped by hundreds of reports.

• Web analytics
  If you choose only one tool for measurement online, make it a web analytics tool. Although other tools are important, the web analytics tool lets you identify success and problem areas on the website. If you do not have any experience with the field, start out by buying a book on web analytics and install a free web analytics tool like Google Analytics, Microsoft adCenter Analytics or Yahoo’s Indextools.
  Keep track of on-site behavior using your web analytics tool, and see where your traffic comes from using the referring sites report and keywords used in search engines to find your website. You can also learn where you are losing business on your website.
• Surveys and tests
  Perform tests on your website regularly. The free Google Website Optimizer lets you set up tests that identify which content or design on your website performs best. Add polls to receive feedback from visitors and let them comment on your blog (if you don’t have a blog, set one up on Blogger or Wordpress). Stay in touch with your users online, and perform offline tests regularly.
• Marketing Relationship Management
  Your web analytics tool will probably tell you all that is happening on your website (if implemented correctly). However, it may not tell you all about the display of ads on affiliate websites or strategic partners, or how they are performing. If you are pan-European affiliate advertiser, consider using a tool like the td Toolbox from TradeDoubler. On the other hand, if your marketing spans multiple channels, you should look into tools that can handle engagement mapping, like Atlas Solutions (owned by Microsoft) or Coremetrics. The alternative is building it yourself in MS Excel and manually updating the reports.
• Conversions and actions
  Your e-commerce system will tell you how many sales have been made, so keeping track of that is easy. However, monitoring all membership signups, newsletter signups, and other important actions on your website may not be as straight forward. Try consolidating all statistics in one place, even though you use different systems for your webshop, newsletter management, blogs, discussion forums and so on.
• Reputation monitoring
  Your brand is, of course, very important to you. To keep track of your brand being mentioned in various social media and in news on the web, use a feed reader to subscribe to news and RSS feeds. Then set up your brand search using MonitorThis and add to your feed reader (see this Problogger post for details). That will give you the benefit of getting updates everytime your brand (or other industry keywords) are mentioned on blogs, social bookmarks, news, or other social activities online.

Tip: Once you have analytics tools in place, make sure you never remove them when updating the website. One of the biggest mistakes in website management is that tracking codes get removed on updates. Don’t let that happen to you.

2. Website optimization

Optimizing your website is the practice of creating and optimizing pages and content on your website, with the purpose of reaching your business objectives like sales, customer satisfaction or membership signup. The purpose is to make the website useful to visitors while at the same time reaching your business goals.

• Web design
  Design for flow in your web design. Try to follow usability guidelines to the best of your ability, without compromising your business objectives. Your website’s navigation should be easy to follow, with short paths to all the content on your website. Do not hide information from your visitors – make it easy for them to discover the contents of your website.
• Functionality
  Make valuable functions available to your visitors. Listen to your visitors’ feedback and upgrade the functions based on their comments. By providing valuable functionality in your industry, you will get plenty of websites to link to you and thereby send you relevant visitors.
• Search engine friendly (technically)
  Use any of the many available free tools online to evaluate the search engine friendliness of your website. Your tags (<h1>, <title>, <meta>, and others) should be following available guidelines. Use resources like the Google Webmaster Forum (and other Google Webmaster resources), WebmasterWorld, SEO blogs like Matt Cutts, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, SEOmoz, Search Engine Roundtable, or Search Engine Journal, and use SEO tools to evaluate your site, like Ranks.nl, SEO Chat tools, SEOBook, or WebConfs.
• Valuable content
  As long as you have a strategy and know your target audience, you should be able to figure out what content might be valuable to them. However, you don’t always know which search terms your audience uses. Keep adding content to target your visitors’ interests, but do some research into what they search for. It will pay off. Sign up for a tool like Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or WordZe, and check SEO Digger for keywords your competitors rank highly on. A longer list of tools is available from the TopRank blog. Create a plan for constantly and regularly adding new content to your website, that is valuable to your audience.

3. Traffic optimization

Optimizing traffic to your website involves both increasing the number of visitors and the quality of visitors. Quality can be measured in the number of conversions, time on the website or any other Key Performance Indicator (KPI) you choose, but it is important to be aware of what constitutes quality to your business.

• Search Engine strategy
  Write keyword-rich content for your website that is optimized for search engines. However, remember to always make the content valuable to your visitors, like I mentioned above. Make the website easy for search engine spiders to crawl and index, even if your website is a Web2.0 site. Content that is only available in graphical format or can only be loaded through scripts should always be available in simple html/text format as well. Create your content for real users, but make it easy for search engines to read.
• Linking strategy
  A lot of times, a linking strategy is seen as part of an SEO strategy. However, by effectively building links to your website you will ensure traffic from multiple other sources than search engines. The Linking Matters website is a good place for starting out with your linking strategy. Other resources are The Link Spiel and the LinkJuicy blog.
• Social media strategy
  There are too many social media/applications/utilities/activities on the web to mention here. However, it’s time for companies to get in the game – it’s not going away. Personally, I use multiple social media, and you can subscribe to my lifestream feed as well, if you like. I have written previously about how to get started in social media, and how to use social media marketing. Other resources on social media are DoshDosh, Jennifer Slegg, and Problogger (on blogging).
• Permission marketing strategy
  Permission marketing is where you acquire permission to communicate to each person before you market to them. Permission may not have been given explicitly, but by subscribing to your feed (or mine), your readers allow you to communicate to them. Give your audience the opportunity to read your content where and when they like, by subscribing to your regular newsletter or to your RSS feed. Use a tool like FeedBurner to keep track of how many subscribers you have. And always give your readers permission to submit their feedback to you!

4. End user communication

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. – Ernest Hemingway

Communication is not meant to be just one way. If you are trying to communicate to your target audience, make it easy for them to communicate with you as well. Listen to what people have to say, and respond to their feedback.

• Contact forms
  Anyone who visits your website has to be able to contact you. That includes publishing your e-mail address, using web forms for users to fill out, shoutboxes, web support chat, and other forms of interaction. Act on the feedback – any opportunity you get. For every person that writes in, there are at least 100 others that don’t, who have the same issue, thoughts or problem.
• Blog comments
  Be accessible by letting people comment on your articles, both positive and negative. Remember to always reply to any comments that are posted to your blog. Unless your blog is as popular as Seth Godin’s, you will (and should make) time for interacting with the people that take the time to give you feedback.
• External communities
  You know that all your customers do not spend much time on your website (unless you’re Google). Go to where your customers are, identify the social media in your niche or industry and get engaged by posting comments, replying to feedback, giving (objective) advice and contributing to the community. Above all, stay committed. If you are monitoring social media (see step 1), you well notice the results from engaging in online communities.
• Ratings
  Ratings are quick and easy functions you can add to your website. It allows you to list popular content or products, which is good for capturing the interest of new visitors to your site. Lists are also good for publishing in social media like StumbleUpon or Digg (depending on your niche) and for search engine optimization. Ratings also let you identify which content and products are popular and which ones you may want to take action on.

5. Online marketing channels

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. – Hubert Humphrey

Regardless of which online marketing channel you use, it’s about connecting with the consumer of your message or advertisement.

• Affiliate marketing
  If you sell products online, or can relate revenue directly to actions on your website (see 1. Monitor and measure), affiliate marketing is one of the best online marketing channels, with a great ROI. Affiliate marketing lets you set your commission levels based on the order value of a sale, your defined value of a lead, or any combination of commissions for clicks, leads and sales. Incentivize your affiliates through the right commission, communication and creatives, and avoid these mistakes in affiliate marketing.
• Search engine marketing
  Most search engine marketing (SEM) is based on paying per click (PPC). This may effect your budget negatively if you don’t monitor and measure your results to identify your revenue generated through this channel. Use metrics like CPA (Cost-Per-Action) to evaluate the ROI on each keyword. Drop keywords with negative ROI and invest in the positive ones – it’s very much common sense.
• Ad banner campaigns
  Ad campaigns are best used for branding purposes. They place your brand on (hopefully) prominent websites, but often have a high cost – you normally pay per thousand impressions (CPM) or per click (CPC). The best performing ads are the ones that engage the viewer. Games, quizzes or other activities are beneficial for the click-through-rate (CTR). However, keep in mind that you set the right expectations for when the user clicks on the banner. Many times, the landing page is the website’s front page or another page, not related to the content in the ad. Make a microsite or a page on your website that lets your visitor continue the experience from the banner. Deliver on your promises.
• ‘Free’ traffic sources
  Of course, ‘free’ traffic is not always free, since they require some work, resources and (in some cases) licenses, but in this case free means traffic to your website that you don’t pay for directly. The best resource of traffic generation is your own mailing list or newsletter. It lets you build a subscriber list of people that are interested in your brand or products. They are the closest to buying from you, so treat that channel with high priority. Search engines, particularly Google, are driving the most new traffic to most websites today. Search engine optimization is a must for any company – I have collected a number of resources on SEO here and here. Directories like DMOZ and the Yahoo! directory have less and less impact on most websites’ traffic directly, but getting listed in directories helps your SEO efforts in most search engines. The increasingly important social media makes a big impact on traffic to a number of websites. I’ve written previously how to get started in social media. Start your blog, do your research, and get your audience engaged.

6. Customer retention strategy

Retaining customers is incredibly important, and should be part of any (e-commerce) Internet marketing strategy focus. Always include retention in your Internet marketing strategy, in what you monitor and measure and what you reward you team on. Acquiring new customers is 10 times more expensive than retaining existing ones.

• Newsletter offers
  When you get a new customer, offer to let them accept your newsletters with upcoming offers, product news and upgrades, and company news – in three (or more) different newsletters. As I’ve mentioned above, newsletters are a good way to communicate through a ‘free’ channel. However, make sure you communicate to the subscriber as an existing customer, not as a potential one. Your retention rate (remember to measure that) will be much higher if you customize your newsletter messages to existing customers.
• Blog engagement and readership
  Dedicate a blog (or a special section of your blog) to existing clients. Inform them of upgrades, get feedback on the use of your products and notify them of problems and solutions. Not only will this work towards retention, but it will build your image as a company that listens to its customers and acts thereafter.
• Website section for returning clients
  Provide a special section of your website to returning customers. Provide manuals and information, and give your customers special offers on related products, bundles or other offers.
• Special login zone in the website for registered clients
  When people buy from you, let them receive a login to your website’s client zone. This is similar to the above bullet point, but more specific, since it lets you keep track of which products the customer owns and target your offers to those products. Provide incentives (competitions, prizes et. al.) for your customers to actively log in and use the client zone, and list offers on related products to what the customer owns.

Resources and further reading

Creating an Internet Marketing Strategy is an extensive project, but the above should give you a good idea on which channels to use.

Here is a list of a few resources you may find useful, to continue reading.

Web Analytics

• Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor blog on web analytics. Avinash is one of the best known evangelists for web analytics.
• Eric T Petersen’s Web Analytics Demystified blog covers web analytics, usually from a different (competing?) perspective than Avinash.
• Web Analytics Association – become a member if you are a web analytics professional. The WAA has a number of resources on Web Analytics.

Web Design

• WebAIM Web Accessibility In Mind
• Blog Design blog about web design for blogs
• For functionality, look at the free tools provided by SEOChat for example. Very useful for visitors and it provides plenty of traffic for the website.

Search Engine Optimization

• Search Engine Guide – small business search marketing
• SEOBook has a great many resources on SEO
• SEO Theory takes a theoretical approach
• Jennifer Slegg blog on search engine marketing

Social media

• Problogger on blogging
• DoshDosh on social media
• Copyblogger on copywriting for online marketing
• Skelliewag tips for bloggers and web professionals

Don’t miss out on any more tips and resources on online marketing. Subscribe in a reader today.

What not to do when marketing on Linkedin

Do not post blatant self-promotion in the Answers section. Here’s a real world example (details removed): 

Win A Book, A Beer or Business Guidance from [...]

The “question” states more benefits and details on what you can win, then includes a link to a blog post for participation. What’s wrong with that?

Well, for one thing, the Answers section of Linkedin is supposed to be for peers getting help from peers in the same field or industry. By “spamming” Linkedin Answers with your promotion, you are guaranteed to put off a number of users.

Secondly, not many people will read the details, since most people who browse the Answers section are those who are looking to help others and answer questions.

Successful Marketing on Linkedin

Of course, answering a lot of questions and linking to your own (well-written) content can be a strategy on Linkedin, but for most of us who are not full time pro bloggers, that is not a realistic strategy. So how can you market your services without spending several hours a day on Linkedin? Here is an example.

1. Identify your topic. It should be something that you are familiar with, but not the recognized expert on. The topic should be something that engages the experts in your industry, and lets you identify who is knowledgeable on the subject.
2. Write an engaging headline. Check out resources like Copyblogger on how to write a headline that engages the reader. The same rules are valid for Answers posts as for blog posts – engage the reader.
3. Keep the details short and relevant. This should be easy if you’re passionate about your subject. Try to inspire people to answer your question with as much detail as possible.
4. Sit back, relax. Or more likely, get back to your day job or start another SMM activity. Wait for the answers to roll in. If you’ve done a good job, you’re likely to get a lot of answers.
5. Reply with thanks. This is your opportunity. The person who answered your question is apparently interested in the topic you asked about. Write an e-mail (through Linkedin) to each person who answered and thank for the answer. Take the opportunity to introduce yourself, and list any Linkedin Groups you run that may be of interest. Most importantly, suggest that the person connect to you, and provide an e-mail address you have registered with Linkedin (you can register multiple addresses).
6. Follow up. If you don’t receive an answer to your e-mail, this is the end of the line for your relationship with that person. However, since you already have started the relationship on Linkedin Answers, your e-mail-to-connection rate should be high. Thank the person for connecting to you (or for joining your group, where you should suggest connecting again).
7. Use your elevator pitch. In a non-selling way, mention your expertise and suggest that if the person knows anyone who might need services like yours, mention your name. Avoid sending a sales letter, instead try to ask whether it’s relevant for your new connection. Provide links to your blog or other websites that provide credibility to yourself.
8. Repeat. Connect to as many people as you can, asking advice and suggesting that you may be able to help anyone they know that need expertise like yours.

Although you are not broadcasting to a large audience, you may be able to get a large number of relevant connections, that you will benefit from in the future.

Use your elevator pitch.

Here are a few ways to get into Internet Marketing, and build a long term Internet Marketing portfolio.   

Affiliate Marketing

Engaging in affiliate marketing is almost by default a long term marketing practice. Your affiliates function as your sales force, or lead generation representatives, and you pay them on the performance they deliver to you. As long as you set up the right commission model, you won’t be paying commission unless you are making money. It’s a win-win model for everyone, where the customer finds your product, you get the sale and your affiliate gets a percentage commission for generating the sale.

Join 2-3 affiliate networks in each market you are in. Use a tool to compare all of them on the KPIs that are important to you. Run a test period of three to six months, then evaluate which affiliate network works best in each market. You can use one network across all markets, however I would only advise that if you are short on resources. The more suboptimization you can allocate per market, the better. If you use an MRM tool to keep track of all markets, you don’t need to use the same affiliate network cross-markets, regardless of what affiliate networks tell you.

Search Engine Optimization

There are many techniques, tricks and hacks to get pages listed high in search engines. If you ask an SEO consultant, you can easily get the impression that SEO can make or break your business. Well, it’s partly true, since you can generate a whole lot of traffic if you rank high on search engines, but if your website does not perform in terms of usability and delivers value to your visitors, you will not benefit in the long term.

If you are in it for the long term, there is an easy way to boil down SEO to three focus areas, for the long term benefit.

1. Make sure your technical structure (html) on your website is readable by search engines. I use a 100+ point evaluation scorecard to optimize websites, but in essence, all you have to do is make sure it is readable in a text-only browser.
2. Write theme-based content – keep all your content on the same theme, and subpages on your website keyword-optimized for one phrase each in the same theme.
3. Build links to your website from authoritative sources. It not only helps search rankings, but also adds to the number of places where your customers can find you.

That is long term and you can do it yourself. If you have the resources for it, hire a consultant or SEO professional in your marketing department to work for you, but make sure you have covered the first three steps on your own.

Internet Advertising Campaigns

Essentially a switch-on, switch-off type of marketing, with fixed budgets and/or a fixed time frame, campaigns are do not get the long term focus from a lot of marketers. A lot of times it’s about burning the last of a budget for a period or testing out various media. For larger corporations, giving total responsibility to media agencies lets the marketing staff wash their hands of the responsibility and just allocate (often considerable) budgets for media spend. That is not long term, that is blindfolding yourself.

However, there is a way to make campaigns long term. Through measuring results from each channel and media provider, you can identify the ones that perform well, even though you don’t pay them on performance. Using a Web Analytics, an EMM or MRM system, you can measure the revenue, sales and/or leads generated by each campaign channel.

Measure a lot of campaign channels to test their performance, keeping your ROI in focus on each of them. Out of all the ones you test, you will have some with negative and some with positive ROI. Select the ones with positive ROI and rank them based on KPIs like generated sales/leads, margin or revenue. Stick with the good ones, and put as much into these channels as you can, depending on your budget. If you can see that a campaign channel is generating a lot of sales and you still have a positive ROI, keep putting money into it.

Search Engine Marketing

Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and the like. Closely related to SEO, SEM campaigns can help you identify which keywords to optimize for and add credibility to your organic search results. Since you generally pay per click, you need to keep a close eye on the performance of each keyword, remove poor performers and add new keywords as you go. The long term SEM plan requires resources to monitor performance on sometimes thousands of ads, so you’ll need a professional dedicated to that administration. Hire the right people, and they will more than likely pay for themselves through sales generated through SEM.

News and Offers Marketing

In this case your own newsletters and RSS feeds – not e-mail advertising campaigns (for that, see Internet Advertising Campaigns). Leverage the power of your database of collected e-mail addresses from opt-in subscribers, members and customers. Send out offers every week or month that is highly relevant to your user base. You can evaluate relevance on simple things like CTR, or use advances KPIs in your web analytics tool. The long term effect occurs when you have built a considerable subscriber base that generate a lot of revenue – and it won’t cost you a cent (other than perhaps a little for your e-mail system).

Social Media Marketing

There are two strategies for marketing through social media. One is to place (more or less) relevant banners and ads on pages where your target audience is browsing (the Facebook model). This model has not worked very well for most advertisers, so far. The other is to actually get engaged in conversations and contribute to discussions online, in blogs, social networks, and through social utilities. In SMM, there is no substitute for manpower and time. However, it is easy to learn, and you can probably hire someone straight out of school, that is already deeply immersed in SMM techniques in his or her free time.

Social Media Marketing is long term, in the way that you are building your company’s image through the people that are engaging in social media conversations online. Integrate SMM with your website, and you will have a powerful advantage over your competitors.

The Key to Long Term

The key to reaching long term results in Internet Marketing is measurement. Always keep your eye on the KPI.

The way to measure results online (on external websites, your websites, RSS feeds and your newsletters) is through adding tracking codes to measure the amount of times any of your content (news, banners, text ads, web pages, videos, and other content) was displayed, how many times it was clicked on, and what results came out of it. Use a tool that lets you compare channels side by side – even though each requires unique administration, you can still compare them on the revenue they generate.

Jon the conversation. Add your comments to this post.

Professional bloggers like Problogger and marketers like Seth Godin all let you get up close and personal with the author, showing the face of the authors in pictures and videos.

Not to be outblogged, here’s a picture of yours truly, in case you haven’t seen me elsewhere. I won’t add my picture to every post yet, but that day will come, along with some better illustrations in my posts.   

This picture is on a lot of social networks, and not to just show you what I look like, here’s my activity in social media online.

14 ways to connect to an Internet Marketing Addict

Here are the social media I am most active in.

• Internet Marketing Addict blog – this blog is where I post most of my findings in Internet Marketing. You can also subscribe to the feed for this blog.
• FriendFeed – aggregation of my social media activity, including this blog, shared bookmarks and microblogging posts.
• Linkedin – I am selective in who I connect to on Linkedin. It has to be someone I know, or a relevant business contact that we both benefit from (Internet Marketing professionals, business contacts in Europe, clients, and so on).
• Twitter – despite my previous statements, I have continued using Twitter a little, since I have connected with a few more people. Still, it is not very useful, and I use it for small announcements, like what social media I’m interacting on, promoting my blog, and some other information, like that I support the WWF.
• del.icio.us – my most active social bookmarking tool, where I add most links I find.
• StumbleUpon – in addition to del.icio.us, I use StumbleUpon to quickly ‘thumbs up’ a page I’m reading, without adding any comment or tags.
• Facebook – I’m rarely on Facebook. Perhaps once a week, when I get new invitations. I am sorely tired of the applications that get sent to me, and have blocked just about all but five or so, that don’t interrupt me too much.
• Technorati – I have used Technorati a bit lately, adding some favorites and subscribing to some blogs. However, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon along with BlogCatalog serve me a lot better in keeping track of blogs I’m following. FriendFeed helps a lot as well.
• BlogCatalog – a great collection of blogs, with a lot of activity from bloggers and useful features.
• MyBlogLog – I have just signed up for MyBlogLog, and I like what I have seen so far, but I don’t know if it can compete with BlogCatalog yet. Please join my community on MyBlogLog if you’re interested in Internet Marketing (especially if you have interest in a European perspective)
• Bebo – also just signed up. I’m not active on Bebo, but some day I might be.
• Google Reader – you can follow my shared items on my Google Reader page or through the feed.

I am on several other social media networks and activities, but these are the primary ones. If you are interested in Internet Marketing, like or dislike what I’m writing, please let me know. Add your comments to this post or connect to me through any of the above social media.