Marketing Strategies on the Internet

Most experts agree with the following, deceptively-simple statement:

Successful Internet marketing depends on two things, having:
1. a well designed website that loads fast, and
2. means of driving large quantities of the right traffic to that site.

"Loads fast" means that the first page and most subsequent pages load in under eight seconds. This assumes you want large quantities of traffic. Some websites might only want a few visitors as long as they are the right visitors.

Criteria for Well Designed Websites

Here is where the arguments really begin. For years now there have been passionate arguments between those who favor image-intensive web design and those who favor text-intensive design. Not to be McLuhanesque, but another way to cast this argument is between those who favor a broadcast-media model and those who favor a print-media model. While there will come a day when you will be able to think of your website as your own TV station (but better because of interactivity), that day will not arrive before broadband is ubiquitous.

Do you want to entertain or inform?

If you inform will it be with images or text? Will it be interactive?

Oddly enough the questions are the same if you want to entertain them. Maybe we're on to something here. Of course we are: form and content, form as content, form versus content, information versus attitude, style over substance, and McLuhan again - "the medium is the message."

Print-Media Model

The text-only people take the text-dominant position too far. After all, print media often uses graphics effectively. I have even seen the argument reduced to this level: · A picture may be worth a thousand words but just try to draw a picture that illustrates some arbitrary thousand-word discourse; which entirely misses the point. Anyone who reads patents knows how useful a drawing can be. Drawings are often the only part people look at.

Ignoring the 'experts' who claim that you don't even need a website - all you need to do is to spam everyone - Oh so wrong so so very wrong - see below "site traffic enhancement by whatever means."

Even flash animation can be the single most effective way to communicate a concept. example of informative flash animation

Site Traffic Enhancement by Whatever Means

If no one visits your website it is not serving you well. However, there are a great many ways to drive traffic to your website. They include print and media advertising, bulk email (spam), targeted email (improved spam), interactive targeted email (spam ala mode), email newsletters, Internet news releases and ezines, banner ads (spam on wheels), online classified ads, and search engine positioning. Concentrating on Internet related methods:

· Bulk email - it's called spam for a reason - not recommended. While it can be effective, it comes with huge liabilities - under some circumstances it is even illegal - and can generate huge amounts of ill will. MediaCraft will not do bulk emailing for a client.

· Targeted email and interactive targeted email - fancy spam but still spam. It must be used with great care or your email campaign will be mistaken for spam with all of the attendant liabilities (see above). MediaCraft will do a targeted emailing for a client as long as we can be sure that the mailing lists are legitimate.

· Email newsletters can be extremely effective. MediaCraft will aid a client in creating, maintaining, and distributing an email newsletter. However, great care must be taken in creating the mailing list or you could be perceived as spamming.

· Internet news releases and ezines - MediaCraft will aid a client in designing and writing a news release and in placing it with the correct ezines. It might also pay to place banner ads with same.

· Banner advertising - spam on wheels - has received almost as much bad press as spam. Much of the criticism has come from the fact that it doesn't seem to work anymore. But used carefully, banner ads can still pack a punch. Both the design of the banner ad and its placement are critical. MediaCraft designs effective banner ads and knows how to place them where they will be cost effective.

· Online classified advertising - MediaCraft designs classified ads for placement in online classified ad directories (online yellow pages). The price for placement is often right - free. But as often is the case, you get what you pay for: it is not often effective. However, if MediaCraft has done other work for a client we will design the ad for a nominal fee and aid in its placement.

· Search engine positioning - an excellent way to build traffic is to rank well with the search engines. If a potential client types in a keyword (or more typically a keyword phrase) that pertains to something you offer, you want your website to be in the top ten listings that the SE turns up. Search engine positioning is a MediaCraft specialty.

Search Engine Positioning (indepth)

If a potential client types in a keyword (or more typically a keyword phrase) that pertains to something that you offer, you want your website to be in the top ten listings that the SE turns up. Some website developers resort to "tricking" the SEs with such tricks as SE-spamming (repeating the keyword many times in the tag section or in text that is invisible to you but not to the SE) and IP-spoofing (detecting that a SE is cataloging the site and switching which page the SE actually sees - this new page can be unreadable but is constructed to fool the SE with many occurrences of the keyword). The downside is that if an SE discovers SE-spamming it will downgrade or delist your site and if it detects IP-spoofing it will ban your site and never list it.

At MediaCraft we use portal pages that are honestly constructed with no tricks but that still meet the SEs' requirements for ranking well. For instance, whenever possible we obtain a gTLD domain name (a domain name that ends in .com or .net or .org) that contains the keyword phrase that the client requires (e.g., we own website-development.net and website-development-nj.com) since SEs give preference to pages of that sort. When that is not possible, we construct portal pages that have the form - www.mycompanyname.com/my-keyword.html - the portal pages then link to the rest of the site. Some of the portal pages may also be designed for a particular SE since each SE has slightly different criteria for ranking sites. Then each portal page must be registered with each of the major SEs.

Our price is $250 per gTLD URL portal page (e.g., www.website-development.net) and $200 for other portal pages (e.g., www.mediacraft.com/website-development.html). These are reasonable prices because each portal page needs to be a mini website.

However, if you want ten or more portal pages we have a basic introductory package that costs only $150 per page. As above, whenever possible we will obtain a gTLD URL for the pertinent keyword phrases. As part of this package we also include SE position tracking.

Our introductory price of $1500 for the minimum basic package is a bargain.

(for more on pricing, click here.)