BASICS: Selling your products or services over the Internet

BASICS: Selling your products or services over the Internet

Any business irrespective of its size gets equal chance to market and sell its product over the Internet. Online Marketing provides the ability to reach the customers throughout the world at a cost which is much lower then other conventional techniques of marketing.

Some Techniques to market your product online have been mentioned below:

Choose a simple url that is simple to recall:

• Buying a good domain name is the most important thing in order to promote your services or products online. Your domain name should indicate and reflect the companies identity and products or services which you wish to sell. The domain name should be simple as well as easy to recall.

Built a website:

• Create a well designed website in order to market your products or services to prospective customers. The website should be well designed keeping in mind the customer. Spending money on a good website is always worth it. Remember, you get what you pay for!

Search Engine Optimization for the website:

• Your website should be optimized using Search Engine Optimization techniques so that when a prospective client searches for products and services which you offer, he should be able to find you.

Offline marketing for website:

• Put the URL of your website on all the printed business abstract and literature -- business cards, invoices, newsletters, brochures, letterhead, ads, etc.
The advantages of having a website are:
• Very inexpensive, provides good value for money.
• Prospective clients will find much more information on the website of a company then what they fill find in a 1 page ad or 15 second commercial.
• More people get to know about your products at no additional cost.
• Your website, which works as a shop, is open 24x7.
• It is simpler for a customer to decide about which product to buy since a lot of details are available on the website.
• Every person who opens your website is obviously interested in your products or services and is therefore a warm lead.

Using E-mail marketing:

Electronic-mail is a free and effective way to promote your goods and services over the internet. However, email marketing can be untargeted form of marketing in some cases. You can save the Email IDs of your potential customer and later on contact them and provide special offers or deals. Recipients are generally persuaded to forward the message to there friends or colleges, which is a form of marketing known as viral marketing or word of mouth. Emails are also used for purposes other then advertising such as for maintaining a relationship or bond with a customer.

Using Internet Advertising:

Pay per click advertising:

PPC is an internet marketing scheme supported by most of the advertising networks, search engines and websites. PPC ads can be easily found in any result page of Google. The advertiser pays a fixed amount when anyone clicks on the ad. In order to launch a successful PPC - search engine campaign, a lot of tasks are involved: taking the best PPC campaign, making effective ads, developing and designing good landing pages for the PPC campaign, etc.

PPC is primarily of two types:

Search-based ads:

• This is a more targeted from the latter, the ad is only shown to people who are looking for services and products that you want to market over the internet (keyword based).

Non-search-based ads:

• In this case, ads are displayed depending upon the content of the page where the ad is to be displayed.

Banner advertising:

You can place your banner ads on the websites which are visited by your target audience. The purpose of banner ads is to drive potential customers to the advertiser's website from the publisher's website. This is comparatively less targeted as compared to Search based ads. Just like traditional banners, web banners are designed to attract customers using great visuals and are designed while keeping the customer in mind.

Things to avoid:

Pop-Up ads:
Pop-up ads mostly annoy the visitors and they should be avoided at all costs. In fact most of the pop-up ads do not even get displayed since most of the browsers block them these days. It can also lead to negative publicity of the company.