Managing Internet Media

Hopefully by now you have begun to realize that your Web site is an important part of your overall marketing plan. As such, it needs to be promoted so that potential buyers can learn all about what you have to offer. The beauty of educating your prospects online is that it reduces labor time for your sales and support employees who can spend more time closing deals instead of fielding inquiries. In addition, the expense to send someone to your Web site need not be overwhelming.

So, let's start with the obvious: search engines and natural placement. Your site should be optimized towards the most general and popular terms. This is "free traffic" so you want to cast your net wide. You can take the time to learn all about optimization and spend hours doing it yourself, or you can choose to outsource the project. Outsourcing prices will vary depending on your site's basic design. Some sites require a completely new design to be optimized - others just need some "tweaking." The only way to know for sure is to have a professional evaluate it. Many professional firms, like Web-Kare, offer free site evaluations. At least at this point you can determine how much all that "eye candy" at your site is really going to cost you.

Whether your site can be optimized or not, you can still take advantage of Sponsored Placement ads. The secret here is good research and constant monitoring. Because you are going to be charged for every visitor that clicks on your ad, you want to make sure that your ad appears only under the most specific terms -- terms that are most likely to be buyers. You also want your copy to be specific enough so that everyone viewing the ad knows exactly what you're offering. Then, of course, you need to monitor your ads on a regular basis to ensure that they are in a high enough position to get results.

There are several areas of Sponsored Placement that you want to document: The number of clicks per term, the click-thru rate for each ad, the average-cost-per-click and the number of "conversions" (those people who visited your site and either placed an order or completed your inquiry form). If you are able to document actual sales - even better. This information will help you determine the Return on Investment (ROI) you're getting from this program.

Beyond the basics, you need to ferret-out other online opportunities to list your site. The more targeted the resource, the better. Publications and/or associations directly related to your market are your first and best source. Some will list your site for free, others will want a fee. Whether or not the listing is valuable hinges on two things: does being listed in this resource help your site's overall ranking and can you attribute actual sales or inquiries back to this listing? Some listings are worth more than others and you may be surprised to find out that the more money you pay for a listing does NOT mean that the listing is more valuable.

This means that you need to document the date you submitted your listing including any costs involved and document your leads. If the listing source does not offer a way to document the leads that they send to your site, you can create your own tracking URL for E-mail inquiries. The simplest way to create a tracking E-mail is to use the "?" in your link. For example, let's say you are going to list at bigcompanylistings.com - you can submit your E-mail address to them as myemail.com?subject=Big Company Inquiry.

Check your site statistics monthly. This will tell you where your site visitors are coming from - check in the section called "referrer traffic." Referrer means that this is the site that sent you that visitor. If you see www.bigcompany.com with 10 referrals, that means that they sent you 10 site visitors.

So, what does it mean when it's your own domain sending your site traffic? It can mean several things: first, these are probably return visitors that have either bookmarked your site or your site was in the cache of their hard drive - OR - they came to your site via a link in their Email. If they had come to your site as a result of an offline ad, they would be counted as "no referrer" traffic because they would have to type your URL in the address bar. So, you see a clue here?

That's right! Call the "no referrer" traffic offline referral traffic - except for the search engine robots that index your site. By keeping good records of your lead sources, you'll be able to make educated decisions about what's working and what's not.

If you'd like some help with calculating your return on investment, click here to use one of our online calculators.