If you want to start your own online business, then you need to look for reliable information in devising your own website marketing strategies. With so many things to think about and figure out, you may be left wondering where you should even start.

You probably already know the first year for any business is the most crucial. You have to start out right; you have to set up a foundation that will get you through the hard times.

Below are some website marketing strategies that could help start your busines on the right track and propel your profits to sky-high levels:

1) Create a business plan and a market analysis on your target audience.

When you strive to do business online, one of the most important things you must do is plan. Make sure that your timing is right.

It is important to be flexible in your business. Be aware of any fashions, crazes, patterns, and anything that’s getting increasingly popular; and then jump right on the opportunity.

The sites below will update you on new trends:
news.google.com
news.yahoo.com
cnet.com
msnbc.com

Use this site to anticipate the popularity of trends:

http://www.google.com/trends

Something that’s popular now, might not be popular in a year or even after a few months, so it’s important to capitalize on what is currently hot or in-demand to maximize your profit potentials.

2) Outsource.

Many small starting marketers outsource their work to prevent any time-consuming trials-and-errors in operating their business.

This strategy is a good idea, as it will provide the opportunity to pass on projects that are too time consuming, or those that just aren’t aimed at any of your personal strong points.

For instance, you may need to hire someone to set up your whole website, with all the graphic and coding demands of a successful site. Those aspects of an online business, along with any other extra things you may want to add to your new site, would benefit from hiring someone else with the extensive knowledge or expertise to accomplish the task flawlessly.

Outsourcing, if you can afford to do so, will leave you more time to think about the necessary aspects of your online business.

3) Know exactly what marketing strengths you possess, and how they can help your business.

Knowing your marketing strengths will allow you to plan and execute your website marketing strategies, which will lead to more paying customers, more business and ultimately more money.

This is because you will know what aspects of the online business you can take care of yourself, and what parts would be better off in the hands of someone else. The less time you devote doing something you really don’t know anything about, the better off your online business will be.

When it comes to online marketing, numerous people just don’t know what their strengths are. It is therefore important to have sound website marketing strategies – and to know yourself, your strengths (and weaknesses), and your business inside and out.

If you don’t know yourself and your capabilities, than you will not fully understand what it really takes to set your business on the road to success.

Imagine walking into a job interview, and being required to answer what strengths you can bring to the table that your potential new job could benefit from.

If you haven’t ever thought about it, you may end up just sitting there silently, ruining your chances of being hired. The same scenario may come about when trying to start your online business; hence, it may delay your success.

4) Get help from your business friend

s.

As you do your business online, it is very important to continuously increase your business friends and nurture your relationships with them.

They might have assets you don’t have access to, and skills you don’t currently possess. They might be able to help you out on several aspects, so be there for them also when they need you.

While you may be the type of person that prefers to work or study alone, even when it comes to your business, don’t underestimate the importance of friends. You should understand that sharing tips – and even experiences – with other like-minded individuals can prove to be helpful.

If you want to achieve faster success and a continuous flow of clients, then sharing ideas and knowledge with others can lead to better results for both you and your business.

How do you make more friends? You have to go out and talk to people. Go to seminars. Invite them for a lunch or dinner. Meet new people as much as you can; the more your networks grow, the more successful your business will be.

It is very important to do your very best as you plan and execute your website marketing strategies. Capitalize on hot trends, outsource the mundane tasks, be aware of your strengths, and grow your list of friends. Best of luck to you!

By Jeremy Gislason
Visit this site and explode your online business http://www.surefirewealth.com/rep/shahmohd558/mem.html

When you market your product, you must not only appeal to the customer (and to each type of customer separately), but you must distinguish yourself from the competition. In fact, most products that compete directly against each other share many of the same benefits. No brand of ice cream tastes “unpleasant.” No infrared spectrometer talks about its “inaccuracy.” All the products in a given category are likely to make a large number of similar benefits claims. So why would a customer choose one over another? There can be many reasons, of course, especially convenience (it’s right in front of them). But often it’s the USP, the unique selling proposition. It’s the compelling benefit that shouts…no one else is like me!

What’s unique about your product? What makes it stand out from the competition? What gives the customer a good and irresistible reason to select your product rather than those other fine products? If you’re making ice cream, you can’t base your whole appeal to the customer by simply saying “it tastes better”–unless you have some credible objective documentation that this is

so. Perhaps you can claim your ingredients are uniquely fresh, or that the ice cream is handmade in some particular way, which makes it taste “better” or at least different than other ice creams. Look at Ben & Jerry’s: They don’t just market their ice cream; they market the structure of the company itself and its commitment to making charitable donations. This helps give them a unique profile in a crowded market.

Many companies base their selling pitch on what’s unique about them. For years, Ivory Soap based all its advertising on its claim of being 99 44/ 100 percent pure…so pure it floats! Domino’s and its two-for-the-price-of-one pizzas. The unique Volkswagen look, which, thinking small again, has returned.

Once you’ve established your product’s range of benefits and distinguished it from the competition, can you sum all this up in one phrase or brief sentence? Such as “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight,” “Nothing runs like a Deere,” “Better living through chemistry” or “Legendary engineering”?

If you can, then you are ready to take your case to the public. It’s time to persuade them to buy.

Selling to the Public: The Four Pillars of Marketing
An old marketing adage says that nothing happens until someone buys something–in short, sales drive every aspect of business. In every company, the salespeople are the front-line troops. In the rough-and-tumble of the marketplace, the slickest manufacturing processes, the shrewdest marketing, the brightest corporate reputations won’t make the sale without the face-to-face (at least usually) meeting of seller and buyer.

This is personal selling, and it’s the most important and direct aspect of the marketing process, but it is not the only way you appeal to the public and persuade them to buy. While marketing in the large sense involves every aspect of your company, the sales side of marketing is made up primarily of these four aspects:

Personal selling is face-to-face salesmanship, when you have the prospect in front of you. It includes retail sales, much professional service selling and a healthy percentage of business-to-business sales.
Advertising is paying for media space or time in which to sell your product at a distance.
Promotion is a short-term activity, directed at either the distributor or the purchaser, to boost sales for a limited time through special pricing or other offers. Of course, you hope the short-term increase also leads to an incremental gain. It can include advertising and personal selling.
Public relations is the unpaid (but, alas, not cost-free) marketing effort you undertake to expose your product to potential customers and other interested parties through the press, trade media and special media-related events.
Personal selling, advertising and most promotion efforts are direct activities: In a straightforward manner, you’re saying “Buy me!” Public relations is the soft sell, in which you take a visible role in the community and increase the public’s general awareness of you.

By Jack Ferrari

OK, so you love your product. You have been around this market for a while, and–quite honestly–you have never seen a product so useful, so inexpensive, so long-lived and so visually attractive. Unfortunately, you are suffering from a condition that affects many businesspeople. Its principal symptom is a blinding lack of objectivity. If left untreated, it can result in the disappearance of entire businesses…company, staff and product, which fade till they become mere ghosts in the annals of business history.

Your customers remain proudly self-centered. They don’t appreciate the glories of your product’s reputation, the immense practicality of its design or the cleverness of its name. No, they’re focused on their personal need. Maybe it’s a car that’s leaking oil. Or a child’s sweater that needs mending. Or a bookkeeping system gone haywire. Or an old coffee pot that’s died and gone to Colombia. What do they want? A solution to their problem, not a product. They want to be able to drive without dripping oil; they want something to keep their child warm; and they want an accurate financial report and a cup of java. You’ve got to present your product as the satisfaction to the need–the scratch to their itch. That, they can buy.

Features Vs. Benefits: The Key to Marketing
In the marketing “Hall of Big Ideas,” the distinction between product features and benefits sits on a raised marble pedestal in the center room under a ring of spotlights. This distinction separates marketers and everyone else in the business world just as sharply as the Berlin Wall divided Berlin into East and West. Many entrepreneurs talk about their product in terms of its features: its capacity, color, strength, durability and other technical capabilities. Marketers (that’s you) are different. They speak of the product, often as dramatically as possible, in terms of how it will benefit the customer. They describe the need the product will immediately fulfill, offering a vision of the wonderfully satisfied customer living his or her suddenly carefree life. Marketers make a living by wish fulfillment (or sometimes, so I’ve heard, by just the appearance of wish fulfillment).

Some companies think “benefit talk” is beneath them: “That’s for retail types,” they say. High-tech businesses, generally selling to technically sophisticated customers, sometimes feel a full-voiced recitation of cutting-edge product features is enough to make the sale. Not so. Every person responds most immediately to what they understand most easily–in this case, what the benefits of the features are. If you spell out the benefits to technical people, they don’t have to calculate them themselves. Why make them work? You don’t have to talk in baby talk. But be as obvious as you can. State your key competitive advantages as clearly as possible.

Some service businesses are also reluctant to think in terms of benefits–to their eventual calamity.

Manufacturers at least have the physical product to talk about. Service providers don’t, and they sometimes feel a deep-seated discomfort with the airy nature of what they offer. They often create esoteric jargon to glorify their “product” and make it appear more mysterious and complicated than it is. There’s nothing wrong with this, except that when the jargon becomes too murky, it obscures the genuine value. As long as the jargon is benefit-oriented, no one suffers.

Benefits are the satisfaction of a need or desire. Let’s take the example of a coffeemaker and study the difference between features and benefits.

What you’re doing is translating from a very accurate product description to the words your customer wants to hear. You’re quite literally translating from one language to another. A parched Parisian won’t respond to “Want some water?” but you’ll get his or her attention with “Voulez-vous de l’eau?” It’s the same thing when you market a product: Customers may see you talking, but they won’t become interested in what you’re saying until you speak their language.

Study your product or service with this in mind, and then train your entire organization to appreciate the sometimes subtle difference in perception. The hydraulics engineer will boast of how many gallons of water a western dam holds, but regional residents will only focus on self-serving goodies like cheaper water, more electricity, fewer floods and more opportunities to take the boat out for a spin. Whenever you list a product’s benefits, you’re answering the age-old question: “What’s in it for me?”

Once you master this distinction, you are halfway to becoming a marketing guru.

Compiling a Key Benefit Inventory
What are your products’ key benefits? You must first develop an exhaustive list of every feature for each of your products. Grill your product people until you’ve got everything. Now sit down with your sales manager (of course, this might be just you and a legal pad) and translate, one by one, each feature into a very short benefit statement. Some may not translate. If one isn’t “benefitable” after reasonable effort, just cross it off. But experience shows that 90 percent of product features can deliver benefits to some market.

Does each benefit apply equally to every market for a product? Lightweight all-weather jackets might pack an enormous appeal to a serious backpacker, but brilliant colors might clinch the sale to suburban teens. Categorize the benefits by the markets they appeal to most powerfully. Then rank them by importance within each market.

Once you have solidified this listing for each product by market, you have created the most powerful tool your sales force can carry. In every customer contact, your salespeople should deliver the full key benefit message. This works for retail sales just as well as business-to-business. Each carefully crafted benefit will appeal to various clients unequally–that’s life. Price may mean everything to one customer, while availability might be the deal-breaker to another. You often can’t know which issue might be driving a customer’s decision. That’s why it’s critical to deliver the entire key benefit inventory at every sales opportunity–in sales presentations, in company literature, in displays. If you can’t fit them all in (small ad, tight schedule or other reason), use the benefits by rank for the particular market you’re addressing.

Key Appeal, Market by Market
Once you have your features translated into benefits, you’ve got to make sure that you know how important given benefits are to each type of customer. There are some things for which almost all of us are customers: restaurants, clothing, vehicles, watches and so on. Sometimes these items can be mass marketed: The manufacturer can apply the same appeal across a large number of people and be reasonably assured of the results. But more often, you’re selling to several different people at once, and you must adjust your product’s presentation to appeal to each of these differentiated markets.

Many times, entrepreneurs have trouble understanding that the exact same product has different appeals, depending on the type of customer you are selling to. Small advertising agencies and freelance writers often get instructions when creating a brochure to make it speak to two audiences, such as to both doctor and patient, when promoting a given medical device. Though both doctor and patient are looking for the same final result, their perspectives are unique. You must appeal to them differently, using different language.

By Jack Ferrari
Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from Successful Sales & Marketing.