Internet Marketing Information

In the early days of the Internet, marketing was easy—a listing on Yahoo! and pages stuffed with keywords was sufficient to guarantee a steady stream of targeted visitors to your site.

These days the web has become far more complex and making your web site effective requires ongoing expert attention.

An Internet marketing strategy is usually the forgotten element in a web project with budget set aside for the development of a site and little left over to promote it. Menlo Web Design believes that continuous marketing effort is just as important as the development of the site.

If you are starting a “bricks and mortar” business it is necessary to advertise to become established, and stay established – the same is true in the Internet age.

Menlo Web Design has expertise in the promotion of web sites on the Internet, and offers its clients customized web marketing strategies.

Please review the rest of our site, and call (650) 269-5780 if you would like more information.

	Are you prepared to do business in the 21st Century? In the last decade stunning advances in digital technology have begun to force a change in the ways small companies do business. Successful companies are embracing the changes and profiting from them. Traditional marketing media such as the Yellow Pages and newspapers are dying as new digital outlets take prominence. Younger customers use the Web almost exclusively to find businesses and services. Internet marketing is now an important part of any marketing program. Today half of all small businesses don’t have a Web site and most existing web sites aren’t very effective. Large corporations with deep pockets are devoting significant resources to attract new customers through the Internet. But the beauty of the Internet is that it doesn’t have to cost a fortune to stake your claim.

There is another way to get top search engine results in a hurry. You can even get small ads for your business to show up on many related sites, even your competitor's sites in some cases.

The search engine companies put you high in the search result listings if you will pay for each visitor who clicks on search results and is forwarded to your web site. You can purchase a number of different keyword phrases to be found for. This service is known as pay-per-click (or PPC). On Google, these listing appear in boxes at the top and on the right hand side of search results pages.

There are two primary companies offering pay-per-click that can be used to good advantage to bring well-targeted visitors. These companies are Google and Yahoo. By paying for "click-throughs" with these companies, your business can expect visitors to your site almost at once.

PPC advertising isn't appropriate for all businesses and the amount you will need to spend varies over a wide range. You are effectively bidding in an ongoing auction for your keywords.

You can set monthly budgets with Google and Yahoo to ensure that the marketing budget isn't exceeded. Menlo Web Design recommends many companies start with a budget of $250 for each of the two search companies to provide a reasonable number of visitors (typically, you can expect to pay between $.25 and $5.00 per visitor to your site, but this depends upon the competition for the keyword phrases you are bidding on). Therefore, $500 per month could bring a as many hundreds of highly-targeted visitors depending on the cost of your keywords.

Continuous management and monitoring of pay-per-click listings is required so you won't pay too much for a phrase, or too little (which demotes your search list positioning). It is also necessary to be on the watch for "click fraud" where competitors or off-shore unscrupulous companies can use schemes to get money by clicking your PPC links.

Menlo Web Design provides a full management solution for pay-per-click services. We will analyze the best phrases to purchase (based on low competition / high volume) which ensures that you pay the minimum amount possible for each click while you get as many visitors as possible. We will then monitor each phrase monthly to make sure that the positioning does not slip and that the correct amount is being paid for each phrase.

For more information on pay-per-click management, please contact us.

	Are there other ways to profit from a Web site? Of course! Because a Web site is visible to the entire world you might want to consider adding e-commerce functions that will let you expand your market to the entire World. A mom-and-pop store is suddenly a 24x7, multi-national corporation competing successfully with much larger companies. And doing it all on a shoe-string budget. A simple shopping cart can have you selling to the whole world over the Internet in a matter of days. Blogs, newsletters and forums can help you stay in touch with your customers at next to no cost.

Flash is a technology from Adobe Systems that allows you to have very fancy animations on your web pages.

Flash looks cool but any kind of animation is going to distract your potential customer from your message. Flash has appropriate uses but is almost always used in ways that are counterproductive to your marketing efforts.

Let's talk about if Flash might be approriate for you.

Think Marketing!

Call (650) 269-5780 today to start the Web selling your business