Jan 28, 2009
Using a Business Plan for Online Marketing
SEO and SEM are taking the online community by storm and many people are packing in the day jobs to make a real go of online marketing and advertising income. Many of these people also fail at this opportunity because of one fundamental problem they all face. Many of these people have not fully formed a proper in depth and well researched business plan. They spend a small fortune on advertising, sponsorship, marketing schemes and more without planning out how their business will grow, develop, utilize advertising and effectively use SEO. Many businesses start out with little to no research on their niche, keywords, organic SEO methods, budget plans and social networking. Whilst some do indeed have business plans the large majority of these consists of poorly thought out basic run downs and aims without any real thought processes behind making money and a clear plan towards their goals.
Unfortunately, you can’t just stick an advert on a website and wait for the money to roll in, because it won’t and you could be waiting a very long time before you even receive one conversion. In fact, without the right SEO marketing plan and budget methods you could receive no conversions at all whether you are after advertising income, services or customers. You do not need expensive business software to create an effective business plan; you can create a proper business plan with charts, color graphs and Ajax websites or on the back of a pub beer coaster. What matters most about a business plan is the research and testing of it.
Ask yourself how the website will be monetized. What will be the main source of income, how will you create that income source? How much capital do you have to invest in the enterprise marketing and building of the website in general? What can you achieve from this budget? How long can you keep the website going before you need to have made a certain amount of profit to sustain it?
Essentially these questions and more can be lumped into three main areas of concern, income method, capital and time. Testing out this business plan is as vital as getting it down on paper (or digitally if you prefer). You need to ensure that you can make enough money to cover your expenses for the project and maybe accommodate for a little profit on the side. Realistically you should assume you are not going to turn out any profit at all in the first 6 months of business and like any other business that has just started up, the first two years will be the hardest and the most turbulent. In fact, if your business plan requires you to turn out a profit in the first 6 months of the business you should not be looking to start up your plan just yet because the likelihood is that it just will not happen.
In order to effectively test out your plan make sure you do the research thoroughly. This includes finding the right niche, researching the niche, researching the keywords, the most effective ones and the content required, and the traffic generated from keywords versus competition on keywords. Find a keyword rich domain to use for your business that is relevant and inexpensive. Start off small with a simple and functional website. You can always upgrade your website at a later date when you are more financially stable and sure of the business.
Make sure your new, simple website is monitored using analytics and webmaster tools. This will mean you can look at traffic in more details including referrals, keywords used in searches, ranking positions of your website in these searches, what the Google bots see on your website, possible coding or duplicate content problems and much more. Test the advertising waters slowly; don’t just plug money into PPC campaigns straight away. Invest small amounts in more permanent advertising that is not PPC and see how it affects your traffic and income. Find out which areas and advertising methods are more effective for your website and try to get involved with higher PR websites if you can.
Unfortunately, you can’t just stick an advert on a website and wait for the money to roll in, because it won’t and you could be waiting a very long time before you even receive one conversion. In fact, without the right SEO marketing plan and budget methods you could receive no conversions at all whether you are after advertising income, services or customers. You do not need expensive business software to create an effective business plan; you can create a proper business plan with charts, color graphs and Ajax websites or on the back of a pub beer coaster. What matters most about a business plan is the research and testing of it.
Ask yourself how the website will be monetized. What will be the main source of income, how will you create that income source? How much capital do you have to invest in the enterprise marketing and building of the website in general? What can you achieve from this budget? How long can you keep the website going before you need to have made a certain amount of profit to sustain it?
Essentially these questions and more can be lumped into three main areas of concern, income method, capital and time. Testing out this business plan is as vital as getting it down on paper (or digitally if you prefer). You need to ensure that you can make enough money to cover your expenses for the project and maybe accommodate for a little profit on the side. Realistically you should assume you are not going to turn out any profit at all in the first 6 months of business and like any other business that has just started up, the first two years will be the hardest and the most turbulent. In fact, if your business plan requires you to turn out a profit in the first 6 months of the business you should not be looking to start up your plan just yet because the likelihood is that it just will not happen.
In order to effectively test out your plan make sure you do the research thoroughly. This includes finding the right niche, researching the niche, researching the keywords, the most effective ones and the content required, and the traffic generated from keywords versus competition on keywords. Find a keyword rich domain to use for your business that is relevant and inexpensive. Start off small with a simple and functional website. You can always upgrade your website at a later date when you are more financially stable and sure of the business.
Make sure your new, simple website is monitored using analytics and webmaster tools. This will mean you can look at traffic in more details including referrals, keywords used in searches, ranking positions of your website in these searches, what the Google bots see on your website, possible coding or duplicate content problems and much more. Test the advertising waters slowly; don’t just plug money into PPC campaigns straight away. Invest small amounts in more permanent advertising that is not PPC and see how it affects your traffic and income. Find out which areas and advertising methods are more effective for your website and try to get involved with higher PR websites if you can.
Labels: seo_services, website_development
