Internet marketing plan II

In the previous part of this Internet marketing plan series, we discussed a few aspects of planning the creation your web site. Besides the site structure that we discussed, it's also important to plan your site's navigation.

Your site's navigation will obviously depend on what your intention with the web site is. Always have your reader in mind. For me, it's sometimes very frustrating when I get to a web site, follow some links to get to some deeper pages and when I want to get back to the homepage, there's no link, so I have to click the "back" button in my browser several times or even go to Google and search for the site again. I avoid such sites in the future.

If your online business is about selling ebooks, you'll employ a strategy that works best for selling ebooks, which will contain a sales letter. Sales letters are an exception in the aspect of navigation. Here you'll want to give your potential customers as few choices as possible. The only links on your site will be the "buy now!" link, and on the bottom a "contact me" link, a "legal disclaimer" link and so on. We'll go into more detail on that in future posts. For now, we'll concentrate on content-driven sites for the purpose of displaying Adsense or pre-selling affiliate products or both...

Having good on-site linking strategy is also important for search engine optimization. Make sure all links are consistent. On my sites, I always use the whole path (i.e. "http://mysite.com/innersite.htm" instead of just "/innersite.htm"). Whichever you use, be consistent. Don't put "www." in front of your site name one time and not the other. To search engine software, there's a difference between "http://www.mysite.com" and "http://mysite.com"). Always use either one option, and have it consistent with your web site address.

This brings me to another very important part of planning your web site content. It's keyword research. This is something that's extremely dreaded by newbies because it suggests a lot of work and usually they don't know how to do it. I personally enjoy doing keyword research and it's the FIRST thing I do before creating a website and also before writing each article.

There are many tools on the market to do keyword research. I use and recommend Wordtracker because it's very easy to use, gives a very accurate estimate of searches and competition for each keyword and even better... it comes up with many "long-tail" phrases people actually use in search engines. Now, such phrases are very important for two reasons:

1.) They have less competition than more general phrases
2.) They bring about more targeted visitors that are looking for a very specific solution and are thus MORE LIKELY TO BUY FROM YOU!

For example, it's very hard to rank high for the term "Internet marketing", but it's much easier to rank high for "Work at home Internet marketing business". And besides, the second term tells you more about the reader and what he/she wants so you can make your presentation more compelling for them.

So, if you don't know what long-tail keywords people search for online, you're missing out on very high volumes of qualified and easy-to-get visitors! So, go work on your keyword research and in the next post we'll continue with an Internet marketing plan for your web site promotion...