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Whether your website is an extension of an offline business or your business is run completely online, its success or failure is determined primarily by your website marketing strategy. Although its core foundations are similar to marketing through traditional media, website marketing is virtually unlike any other marketing you may have done. When it comes to a small business, I firmly believe that all marketing should be based on the classic marketing mantra: attention, interest, desire and action. Having these four aspects as part of any marketing plan, through any media, will provide a solid foundation for success. In this article, I’m going to take these classic marketing keys and discuss the crucial place they have in marketing your website on the internet.

Regardless of the media you choose, nothing will ever happen if you don’t attract the attention of prospective buyers. This is one of the very basic tenets of successful marketing. On the internet, this concept is evaluated by the traffic that you receive on your web site. But there are a lot of factors that affect how much traffic you get, and only part of it is the actual content of your web site. There are two ways you can get attention in any media: you can earn it or you can buy it.

All of the major search engines you are familiar with like Google, MSN, and Yahoo rate sites based on ‘free’ or ‘organic’ results. In other words, the more traffic a site has and the more relevant the site is, the higher the ranking will be. When someone searches on a specific term on one of these search engines, the resulting list of web pages is presented in a certain order, which is determined by the search engine’s qualification criteria. Because a typical customer is most likely to only concentrate on the very first page of results given, if you are able to boost your ranking to the first page, your website will attract more visitors. Actually if your website appears on the third page or later, it is highly likely that no one at all will see it because most people won’t search past the second page. But is there anything you can do to change your ranking? Actually there is! To help increase your ranking, you can turn to a method known as ’search engine optimization.’ You can hire a firm that specializes in this field. Or you can do the research and put in the time and effort to do it all yourself.

Buying your traffic on the internet is usually done by purchasing some form of advertising from someone who already has high traffic to their web site or email contact list. The most widely used forms of advertising are the banner advertisement and text advertisements. Banner advertisements were all the rage when the internet first became popular. However, their effectiveness diminished greatly to a point where many people began to see them as a waste of money. However, they can be used effectively as long as you have a plan and clearly track your return on investment. More common now are text advertisements which were largely brought into the forefront by Google. You can see Google text advertisements on their search results pages and on millions of individual web sites across the internet. If you want to generate traffic fast, and are willing to pay the money to do so, text advertisement are the most popular method. Google, MSN, and Yahoo are the major players in this market, but Google is still clearly the big dog in this pack.

As you can see your web site marketing strategy must first be focused on getting attention. Attention first requires that someone is exposed to your message. You can earn the exposure, you can buy it, or like many businesses you can do both. Earning the attention is a long term focus and requires skill and consistent commitment of resources. However, it pays off almost indefinitely and likely much cheaper in the long run than buying it. Buying the attention is much faster to get results and allows you to test ideas without committing the resources to earn attention. Any comprehensive web site marketing strategy is likely to include both methods.

You can get more information about Business Marketing Plan at http://www.BizRave.com . Eric Menzies writes about Fastest Way To Increase Page Rank and other topics.

- Eric Menzies