3 Important Factors in Selecting Your Internet Marketing company

As you’ve seen from my book, The Winning Way – Ultimate Checklist of 500+ Proven Internet Marketing Strategies, there isn’t a shortage of methods to market your online business and drive traffic. In fact, the opposite is true. There are so many options out there that the real question is, what can you focus on that will yield the greatest results?

In ideal circumstances (unlimited time, money, and knowledge) you’d work on incorporating every Internet marketing strategy imaginable. Think of all the traffic you’d get. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible for any company, big or small. Much like selecting a topic for your business, Internet marketing is most effective when you go niche and focus in on a few things.

When I wrote The Winning Way, I covered a vast range of marketing tips. However, it wasn’t my intention to imply that you had to check off each of items in order to be successful online. What I did was present you with a lot of different options. It’s your job to look through them all and find the ones that work best for your site.

How do you find the best marketing strategies for your needs? That largely depends on 3 important factors – effectiveness, skills, and resources. I’ll cover each of them here and explain how it applies to you.
1. Effectiveness of the Method

As you might have guessed, not all marketing tactics are equal – especially across different niches or industries. For example, while social media might be a great channel for a technology review site, it would probably be less beneficial for a site selling industrial tools. Similarly, display advertising works well when used for branding purposes, but usually lags behind other channels like PPC when used for lead generation.

Understand your business goals and your target audience. Where do your potential customers go online? What do they respond to? Once you have that down, analyze each of the different marketing strategies and see if they are good fits for your business. After that, it’s just a matter of testing and going with what yields the best results.
2. Your Skills & Experience

If you’re an independent webmaster, you can’t just throw money at marketing like some the big companies do. A lot of times you’ll have to do all of the promotion yourself. Sure, the effectiveness of the strategies is still important here, but that will depend heavily on your skills and experience. Are you a good writer? Then start a blog and build authority in your chosen niche. Don’t have much technical knowledge? Then stay away from tinkering with your site’s code for SEO purposes.

Focus in on the marketing that you’re good at. You don’t need to be a jack of all trades to be successful. For everything else, you can either bring on a complementary partner or outsource the work.
3. Your Resources – Time & Money

Finally, the last criteria for selecting marketing strategies to focus in on is resources (time and money). Time and money are limited and you have to spend each of them wisely to achieve maximum results. For example, if you have a lot of time, but little money, it makes sense to engage in guerilla marketing (e.g. forum posting, blog commenting). However, these practices are a waste of time if you have a lot of money. You can outsource these tasks and spend your time more efficiently. Same goes for SEO and PPC. If you’re strapped for cash, SEO makes the most sense. If you’re rolling in the dough, PPC is the way to go.

What Internet marketing strategies are you focusing on today to build your business? Have you analyzed effectiveness, skills, and resources to utilize methods that will get you the most exposure in your particular situation?