In my marketing class, I learned a process by which businesses plan their strategies. I figured this process will help me market websites more efficiently and effectively. So here are the secret steps to success:

1. Define your site’s goal and mission: Ask the question, what is this site supposed to give to the visitor? What benefit will the visitor receive? And most importantly, why should they go here rather than a competitor’s site?
2. Analyze your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT Analysis for all you schoolkids)
   
   • Strengths: Figure out what you have that your competitor’s don’t. This could be as simple as an easier-to-remember domain name, better design, etc.
   • Weaknesses: What do other sites have that you don’t? This will not only help you see where you can improve, but also, how to turn these weaknesses into strengths.
   • Opportunities: What kind of opportunities are coming at your site? There may not be very many, but anything from advertising, getting reviews, etc..
   • Threats: How can competitor’s sites threaten you? Sure they already have traffic and loyal visitors, but how can they seriously hurt your performance?
3. Identify Marketing Opportunities: How can you “get your foot in the door”? For this step look at what specific audience you can target that your competitor is not targeting very well. You can start by targeting a certain age group, a demographic, a culture, or even target certain countries only. The second part is to position yourself so your site clearly answers number one of this entire process when a visitor goes to your site. Because as everyone should know by now, first impressions as usually last impressions.
4. Implement your marketing strategy and use resources: In this step actually go out and get your word out there. The best way to do it is to follow the, what marketer’s call, 4P’s:
   • Product or Service: Position your websites service or products to make the customer’s you are targeting want it. The best way people will return to your site is if they see a need in your service. Therefore, create value in your site.
   • Price: If you’re selling products or offering memberships or paid services, consider your price carefully. It may be beneficial to lower your initial prices to compete against the competition. But then again, you don’t want to become the Wal-Mart of web design, so take that into play as well.
   • Place: This is key. In the real world, you want to create a service in a location where it is readily accessible. In the virtual world, you want to create a site that is also readily accessible. Therefore, downtime, long loading, server hardware are important. Imagine you follow the above steps and you make it to the front page of Digg and you’re on a shared server. There’s a good chance you’ve just pissed off a lot of visitors when your site went down.
   • Promotion: Decide where and how you want to advertise in conjunction with what you’re promoting in the other three P’s above. If its a blog, you can use reviews, banners, blog networks, etc.
5. Evaluate your Performance: If you thought the above four things would turn you into a successful entrepreneur, I’ve got great news. It may, but there’s a fairly high chance that’s not going to happen the first time. So it is vital to track your site and target market and see how you can improve your sites performance as the process rolls by. For many, this process is never ending as websites continuously struggle to increase market-share, develop a strong foundation in their area of expertise, and broaden their horizons.

So that’s basically the plan. If this method works in the real world, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work with the internet world as well.

Popularity: 52% [?]

It seems as if it has become a tidal wave when everyone has started talking about affiliate programs and how you can make money from them. There’s even dozens of ebooks claiming to tell you the way to make millions from affiliate programs.

I’m not going to lie, unless you want to get yourself into dirty, sinful, no good adult affiliate programs, you’re not going to make millions. However, affiliate programs can bring in good income. The key to any affiliate program lies within the name itself. You ‘affiliate’ yourself with some company and give them leads. And in order to do that you need traffic.

Traffic is the key to nearly 99% of how the internet operates. If you don’t have customers, who are you going to sell to? So your task is to figure out how to gain traffic whether it is by email subscriptions, paid traffic, website traffic, advertising, you name it. I won’t go into details in this post, but stay updated on how to spend less and earn more!

Popularity: 10% [?]