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Last night, I was thumbing through a newspaper and looking at the ads. Something I hardly ever do since I think most of us are now trained to ignore these advertising messages. I was looking at a page and realising how similar all their ads were. Where are all the unique advertising ideas?

We have the same problem online, the same websites selling the same products the same way. How dull!

What is the purpose of your advertising? To get a potential customers attention. To make them notice you. Then you start them on the sales process with your compelling offer. You don’t get noticed by being the same as every other business.

I saw one unique ad in the newspaper, a restaurant that put it’s advertisement upside down. Now that gets your attention and curiosity. I’ve actually noticed their ad before and remember it because it was printed upside down. Maybe with a few more impressions I’ll actually work out what the restaurant’s name is and go there. In their case, they got my attention but didn’t have a compelling offer, even though I think they’re an Indian restaurant and I love Indian food!

So first, use an unique advertising idea to get your potential customers attention, then give them an offer they can’t refuse!

The bane of any web designer is trying to make their beautiful website cross compatible with all the different browsers out there. Of course, some don’t really care and say if you’re not using Internet Explorer at 1024*768 resolution you can take a long walk off a short plank.

But for the web designers that care, trying to have your website looking perfect in all browsers can become a little tricky, especially the more complicated your website becomes. With Firefox entering the market, no web designer can continue to hide behind the browser share statistics that used to heavily favour Internet Explorer. Firefox now has 35.4% of the market and has had over 25% for almost two years now.

Even with small market share, it can still impact your business. I’m currently working with a client whose target market is students. His current website has simple drop down menus, but they don’t work in Safari, making his website unusable. While it only has 1.6% of the market, most of that market will be students. My graphic designer uses a Mac, and a lot of young students do to.

As for browser resolution, believe it or not, people are still using 800*600. I was pitching to another client the other day and pulled up her current website to talk about it. Nicely designed website, but on her 800*600 resolution she had to scroll horizontally to see all the content. I don’t know how a web design company got away designing a website that looked crap on the paying clients computer, but that’s the industry unfortunately.

But I digress. I have to go fix my website in Firefox again, apparently some recent changes have broken it. The joy of browser compatibility.

Who would have thought you could get all your website design, optimisation, and promotion needs met from Spain. And in English as well. I tried London, but couldn’t stand the weather and so now I operate out of Madrid. Sure, it still gets cold in winter, but at least there’s daylight!

That’s one of my favourite things about working with the internet, you can do it from anywhere. And if you create a successful business, you should be able to run it from anywhere as well. If you want to live on a tropical island and have your office overlook the beach, it’s within your grasp. I’m not one of these ‘internet marketing gurus’ that claims it’s easy. It’s just like starting any other business and making it successful, but with more potential customers.

Anyway, back to what you came here for, some quick tips.

Your website design: keep it simple and usable.

Your website optimisation: focus each page on a particular keyword phrase and fill in the title, meta, h1, alt, p, and b tags for a start.

Your website promotion: submit articles, comment on blogs, post in forums. Then get creative and do something different!

There’s the world’s shortest guide to website design, optimisation, and promotion. Keep digging round my blog for more detailed information, it’s all over the place.

I recently started working with a client in a very competitive industry. As I started to examine the competition, I realised something amazing: all the competitors were the same! Every single one of their websites had exactly the same links, the same boring information, and they were promoting on the same competitive advantage.

If your business markets itself like everyone else, how does it plan to get business? The answer seems to be luck. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t sleep very well at night if my entire business’ future rested on luck to attract customers.

The world is changing, business is changing, and you need to be changing too. Gone are the days when you can just throw out some marketing and hope it sticks. And soon doing the same marketing as your competitors will sink you as well.

It’s time to make a plan, it’s time to make your marketing different, it’s time to make your website stand out!

Ok, so once you’ve got your website sorted and mastered the basic internet marketing techniques you’ll want to try something a little more tricky. This is where the advanced internet marketing techniques come in. Most of these advanced techniques are based on the basic techniques so there’s no use skipping straight to here either. If you’re still looking for the get quick rich answer, I’ve told you over and over that you’re not going to find it here.

Brand Building
What do all big successful companies do? That’s right, build a massive brand. Before you dismiss this as out of your budget, let’s think about it briefly. First, what is a brand? I would say the public perception of your business or product. So what forms your brand? All the interactions you have with the public. And what are a lot of the intermediate techniques? Bingo, interacting with the public by helping solve their problems and creating a positive public image of your company. So have a think how you can continue to develop your brand.

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is creating something that spreads through the internet like wildfire. Created half through skill and half through luck it is definitely worth some attention. Think of some of the email forwards you’ve seen over the years. Think of Youtube videos that people have spread around. Imagine having your business’ name attached to the Star Wars Kid. Now that’s powerful.

Alliance Partners
Taking direct marketing to the next level involves partnership. Think about your nice big mailing list. Now think about all the companies in your industry that have those same sized mailing lists. You make one alliance and you just doubled your potential customer list. Just remember that you need to still be offering your customers something great from the other company that adds value to your customer relationship. And never sell your mailing list or let it get into the hands of spammers. Market your partners’ products to your customers yourself.

Backend Systems
Want even more bang from your mailing list. Welcome to the backend sales process. So once you’ve got a customer, how do you keep them a customer? Have them buy something else from you of course. If your customer bought product A, chances are they may be interested in product B. Especially if product A was incredible and exceeded their expectations. Again, remember the golden rule, always be offering your customers more value. Not just trying to add value to your bottom line.

Competitor Analysis
I’ve put this in advanced because if it’s done properly, it really is an advanced technique. I hope you have some form of competitor analysis now. At least going to their website and see what they’re up to. But if you really want to be the head of your niche you need to take this a lot more seriously. Examine in depth your competitors. Work out what they’re selling, how they’re selling it, what their unique selling proposition seems to be. Why are customers buying from them? By knowing exactly what your competitors are doing, you can outmanoeuvre them at every point.

So there you have it, enough internet marketing techniques to keep you going for a long time. As time goes by I will have been writing longer articles on each technique so you can fully implement them in your business. However, remember that new techniques are not the most important thing in your business.

It all stems from your mindset, you as the entrepreneur. If you haven’t got this area handled, all the techniques in the world will not save your business. So train your mind, and everything else will follow behind.

Ok, you’ve got your basics sorted and your website is a lean, mean conversion machine. Now you’re looking for some ways to market your website.

I’ve prepared a list of incredibly obvious ways of marketing a website. All effective but definitely thinking from well inside the box. These are the ones everyone does after skipping the fundamentals and then they wonder why they don’t get the results they want. At least you’ll have the advantage of a decent website and these techniques are your starting point when marketing a website.

Content
You’re involved in a specific industry or niche. You work in it everyday. What does that mean? Yes, you are an expert in that field. So why not use that expertise of yours to help others. This means writing articles and putting them on your website. A guide, an ebook, anything your visitors will find useful and leads to them forming a relationship with you. You build trust, you get people spending time on your website, and you improve your search engine rankings. Win, win, win!

Advertising (Banner Ads)
This is a complete waste of money if you ask me. Traditional advertising just doesn’t perform on the internet, despite having your flash moving, eye catching designs. These are more likely to have me leave a website than actually click on an ad. But if you test it and it works for you, more power to you. You’re better off to put your money towards advertorials or creative advertising solutions.

Pay per Click (PPC)
Since traditional advertising wasn’t working, some bright spark came up with Pay per Click advertising. A much better model that is actually worth investing your money in if you do it right. Just remember to target your niches and try to find qualified customers rather than just any random visitor and you can have a lot of success with PPC.

Newsletters
The newsletter subscriber list can be a goldmine for your website. Most people don’t use it correctly and we’ll discuss that more a little later under Direct Marketing. You need to have a way to collect emails and a newsletter, usually offering a free gift for your email, is the standard way to go. They’re becoming a bit overused now and you need to make sure you really give people a reason to join your subscription list.

Link Building
Having your website link on other websites is obviously a good way to get visitors and it helps your search engine rankings immensely as well. Just be aware that gone are the days when you just exchanged links with anyone. You need links from websites related to yours and preferably ones where you don’t have to link back. How do you achieve this? Create a website with excellent content that others want to link to of course.

Blogs and Forums
Remember, you’re an expert in your field. So go out and share that expertise with the community. Go and visit the blogs and forums that talk about your area and help other people. Free advice can get them visiting your website and builds trust again. It means you’re not some faceless website on the internet; instead you’re a friend who helped them out with a problem once.

Article Submission
You’ve been writing articles for your website so why not share your expertise with even more people. With loads of free article submission directories, these articles can get picked up and used in websites and email newsletters all over the world. Be aware that this is a little swamped with submissions now too so you’ll need high quality articles and some luck for people to notice.

Press Releases
New products? New website design? New staff? Something going on with your company? Write a press release about it. Again there are submission directories that will publish your press release and put it in front of journalists for your industry or niche. Not as tapped as article submission and if you learn to write good press releases you can get a lot of exposure through this.

Direct Marketing
Now you should have a nice list of newsletter subscribers and past customers. So what are you doing with this list? Are you sending them targeted offers that have them drooling over their keyboards? Learn how to write sales copy and create offers that add value to your customers and money to your bottom line.

So there you have the bread and butter techniques for marketing your website. You might have some more you’d like me to add as well but I think I’ve covered the main ones. When you’ve got these under control you can climb out of the box a little and move on to some advanced internet marketing techniques.

Your website needs four basic components to be built correctly before you start even thinking about getting fancy with Internet Marketing. I call them DUFF for short:

• Design
• Usability
• Findable
• Functionality

Design
If your website doesn’t look professional and trustworthy you can kiss customers money goodbye right from the start. If you can’t get this right, I’m never going to trust you to get a credit card processing system right! Fortunately there are a lot of web designers out there and this is where they excel. Don’t skimp on your web designer, I know you have a friend who can do it, but you need a professional.

Usability
This is the hidden component of design that often gets overlooked. Your website must be ordered in a nice, easy to follow and logical way. Menu systems should be abundant on your pages and easy to use. Every page has an objective, whether it’s to get you to the next page or complete a sale, make sure it’s fulfilling its objective. And make it fast to load, especially if you may have customers on dial-up, you’d be surprised how many that could be. Lots of text but graphics in moderation is the way to a healthy website.

Findable
To use the ancient Chinese proverb: “If you build a business in the forest but no-one is around to visit it, does it make a sale?” This is even truer of the internet and a critical factor. How will you get people to visit your website? Marketing! And one of your critical marketing actions should be making your website rank well in the search engines with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Once it’s there, it costs you very little to maintain and the traffic comes from people wanting to learn about and buy what you are selling. Traffic can also come from other marketing like Pay per Click (PPC) ads and Viral marketing, but SEO should be in every beginner’s bag.

Functionality
Does the website do its job, normally, sell your product? Whether you accept credit card payments online or have contact details on the website, are people buying your products? This is one of the most overlooked aspects of a website and a personal pet peeve of mine. As I said before, every page has an objective, and most of them should be leading the customer closer to the sale. Make sure you write a good website that people are compelled to buy from and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Once you get all these components sorted you can move on to actually marketing your website. We’ll talk tomorrow about some basic techniques to use. But remember, you should be starting with these four aspects or the visitors you attract will just as quickly leave your website.

To be successful on the internet is not unlike being successful with a business or store in the real world. The only thing that has changed is the technology and the scale. The problem is most people don’t realise that and think because of the technology and scale, they can skip all the normal business practices that got them this far. People chant the mantra, “if you build a website, they will come!”

Sorry, but this is the first lie of the internet. If you build a website, no-one will look at it except your friends and family, and maybe the people receiving your business cards.

So how do you make your website effective? You integrate it with your business and most importantly your marketing plan. But you also need to think outside the box and create a unique marketing tool for your business. All your competitors have websites, so what makes your website different? Your business is different, why isn’t your website?

In business improvement, like most things in life, I believe that the correct mindset comes before the correct techniques. I could have made a website that was all about Internet Marketing, or Search Engine Optimisation, but there are already enough of those on the internet and they’re obviously not benefiting enough people.

That’s why, when I talk about becoming successful on the internet, I talk about growing your internet business. It’s about bringing all the different components of your website and business together into an ultimate marketing tool.

So if you’re truly committed to improving your business on the internet, keep reading. If you were looking for another get rich quick scheme that didn’t require any effort on your part, this obviously wasn’t the place for you.

I love the Way Back Machine! From a business perspective it’s a useful tool for making sure no naughty spammers have owned your domain name in the past. Thus causing it penalties in Google, etc.

But it also lets you reminisce. It has some snapshots of my old ecommerce business in New Zealand that brings back fond memories. You can see it when it just launched in November 2003 and then again just before we closed it down in December 2004.

Unfortunately my old business partner received an offer to start another business that actually had a salary and capital behind it. It would be interesting to see where it would be today. Thanks to what started off as his blog, he’s created quite a nice geek community of our target customers.

Despite the images missing, I’m still quite proud of it. Remember, this was running three years ago now! I think it’s design and sophistication could still beat a lot of sites out there today.

Anyway, that was a nice trip down memory lane for Friday. And here I am back in the business game. I love my life!

Expanding your business can be difficult at times, especially when you’re doing all the work yourself. The secret is to exploit the power of Strategic Alliances. Find a company that serves your customer base and see what kind of joint ventures you can do.

This could be as simple as being advertised as a trusted friend in their mailing list. Or you could group products together and make joint offers to your customers. In a strong alliance you could even up-sell each others products.

Create a great network, use it creatively, and your business will grow overnight.