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So you have a great idea for a site.  You’ve created, or had created for you, a unique, clean and modern site.  You have your ecommerce application loaded up and ready to go.  You even had your site built so that way the pages and URL’s are search engine optimized.  Now what?  How do you go from being a new site with no visitors; to a site getting thousands of visitors a day?  One word…. Marketing!

If you don’t market your site, no one will come!  It’s that simple.  But there is a catch; the marketing that you do also represents your business.  Spending money and time on an ill-thought marketing “scheme” will only make your  business look worse to the people your are trying to reach.  This means that it’s very important (especially on the world wide web where business transactions time has been cut down to minutes; if not seconds) to have a clear plan about what you are trying to do.  Can anyone say, paper and pencil?

There is no substitute for sitting down and letting your imagination go wild.  Let out all of your ideas.  If you work better typing them out, then do that.  Do restrict yourself right now.  What you want to do is start writing down thoughts, ideas and emotions that have to do with different aspects of your business and website.  Here are some ideas:

• How thoughts/feeling are brought up when I am looking at my site? (Get real abstract with it;  even if you don’t really FEEL anything about your site, dig deep and pin it down to an emotion or two)
• What do I want people to think/feel when they look at the site?
• What types of customers come patronize my business?
• How do I imagine people using my site?
• Does my business feel like it fulfills some need?
• How can I convey that my business fulfills needs through traditional and internet marketing (including the look and feel of the site)

You want to go through every aspect of your site and business and give it a mental and emotion audit.  Your site doesn’t make you think and feel the way you would want it to; either reevaluate your expectations or redo your site/business image and branding to match that.  Marketing is about convincing your prospects to feel and think about you in a certain way.  You can do that without a well thought out brand and look.  Once you have those, it makes marketing a walk in the park.

Now you want to think of how you will move your prospects to get more information from your site or to flat out buy.  This will be reliant on the style your marketing is executed in, as well as the channels used to execute that marketing.  In terms of style, do you want a serious campaign, a silly campaign, an informative campaign?  If you spend time on correctly building your brand image; those things will be obvious.  Also, it matters what channels you use to reach them.  You wouldn’t do a young, hip and cool marketing campaign and use AM radio as your primary way of reaching your market.  You would want to use an informative and serious campaign though.  If you think about the majority of people who would be listening to AM radio; you can start to put yourself in their head and figure out how to speak to them.  Trust me, it may seem like a bad example, but it is completely relevant.  If you, for instance, want to let sports fans know about your new sports event streaming site; what better place to let your target market know than AM radio.  Who listens to AM radio and why?

Different Marketing Channels include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linked In
• YouTube
• TV
• Radio
• Email
• Print
• Magazines
• Etc

The list is really goes on for a long time.  You can really create different channels of marketing.  It’s all about figuring out what kind of people shop with you; and then use different medias and styles to talk to them in a way where they will understand what you want them to understand.

Budget is a very important part in all of this.  One thing to remember though is that it isn’t necessarily how much money you spend.  You can reach quite a lot of people through free marketing channels like YouTube and Facebook.  With properly executed plan, you could reach more people than the Super Bowl; for a longer amount of time.  Of course this is hyperbole, but is very possible.  This means that if you don’t know where to start in order to PROPERLY use these marketing channels; find someone who does.  Google someone who does web marketing and SEO.  It is worth paying someone, if they know what they are doing.

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