In recent years we heard numerous stories on this mysterious world called "The internet" and on its abilities to contribute to the company's advancement. The more information we have, the bigger the mysterious cloud is. On one hand, people "sell" us that in the internet everything is measurable, exact and structured, but in reality the big cloud makes it hard to see the big picture.



A business which makes its first steps in the internet world can easily be sucked into this "black hole" of lack of information. In this article I will try to give a basic structure that best describes the first steps a new business has to make when joining the "on-line world" and I will go over some of the components of the Internet Marketing Mix

The first basic Step: Building a website for the company

Most of the websites are perception websites, meaning they showcase the business in general. In other words they are the "business card" of the company.

For this reason, we must give a great deal of attention to the graphic design portion of the website, but we still need to pay attention to other evenly important topics like a comfortable and easy to0 use interface for the surfer and the placement of the site in search engines. For example' a website which is built in FLASH technology can look very good visually, but will placed very low in the search results. In addition, It is important to do a small research on keywords and key phrases for the website and put some emphasis on them when writing the content of the pages.

There is an old argument between website designers and marketing experts, when building a website that its purpose is to be profitable one must put the emphasis on the website marketing principles and encouraging the web surfer to make the next desirable click.

Registering in Indexes and Categories

This is one of the most old (and cheap) marketing tools available in recent years. Because a lot of visitors come from search engines and different indexes, it is important for those indexes to know the website and place it in a high position. In most indexes this service is free, except for major indexes like Yahoo! which require a payment for registering.

Indexes that require payment usually ensure a quick submission to the index and significant better search results. It is possible to register to these indexes in different ways like using different registration software, searching the web for a specific index and registering in it or using and outsourcing company which professionalizes in the field and has a large database of indexes and advanced registering tools.

One of the software that offers registration to indexes and has gained a worldwide success is Web Position Gold, which registers the website in one click to a large number of indexes on the net.

Search Engine marketing

After registering the site, the search engine marketing divides into two parts:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Positioning the website in the "natural" search results of the search engine after the web surfer typed the relevant keywords for the website. The process includes technical match between the website and the leading search engine's requirements, correspondence between the website's structure and content, placing relevant keywords in the relevant pages on the website, updating the search engines on the changes in the website, assimilating links to the website from other strategic websites in the world and more. This is a long and complicated process, usually done by professional companies. The optimization process is the corner stone for the amount of future traffic to the site and in the branding of the site on the web. For the most part, when the process is done professionally we will get positive results.

2. Sponsored Ads – The advertiser/site owner sets the price he is willing to pay for each time a web surfer clicks his ad that will lead him to the website. This amount is a major factor in determining the order in which the ads will show. The ads are usually places on the side of the page under the headline "sponsored link", like we can see on Google. This is a very efficient advertising method, and one of its biggest advantages is that we can advertise with a relatively small budget.

Direct E-mails Marketing

Creating a customer database for direct e-mails is one of the important corner stones in every business in general and in websites in particular. Remember! Direct E-mailing is very complex from a legal stand point, meaning it is extremely important to get the approval of the customer before the beginning of the emailing process. This is done by creating a form on the website and creating a sign up mechanism to get information from the site (opt-in).

How can we form the initial distribution list and make it bigger?

We must remember that without the right incentives, the number of sign-ups to the site will be low and therefore we need to decide on the ways we can make the visitors sign up on the site. After creating the membership club we need to manage the direct emailing in an efficient and structured way. It is important that we will be able to check how many people opened the email, how many received it' how many responses we got back etc. At this point we have a website that receives traffic and manages a customer database. In order to continue in the right direction we need to analyze the traffic to the site, to focus it and make more efficient.

Traffic Analysis – ROI (Return on Investment)

Traffic Analysis has become in recent years on of the most significant and sophisticated in the internet world. Advertising on the internet will not be effective without analyzing the results and assimilating the needed changes accordingly. There are many different software available, some free and some by payment' which provide traffic analysis in different complex levels. The more information we will have on the visitors on the website, what they saw, where they spent a lot of time, where did they exit from quickly, how they got to the site, why etc, the mire we can learn on how t mange the site correctly and what we need to change in it, and we can turn the marketing budget only to those channels who bring me the highest ROI.

The five steps we examined are basic steps that each business has to make when entering the on-line world. These steps are not all the steps in the Internet Marketing Mix and there are other steps such as PR on the internet, segmented advertising, viral marketing and "guerilla" marketing. There is a one myth that is very important to break – Internet Marketing CAN NOT be the only marketing channel for a website/business. Even a very successful website which is marketed in an excellent way on the web will not be able to carry the load of the whole business and has to be followed by off line marketing that leads to the website in channels such as PR, direct emailing and other similar channels.