Creating a Strategy for Internet Marketing Success

Glen Allsopp / 13 Comments / July 3rd, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

This is the first post in what you could describe as a ’series’ on building your own internet empire. Although ViperChill is where I spend a lot of my time due to the passion I have for the industry, it’s certainly not the only website I run…far from it.

This series is going to look at various aspects of helping you create a successful empire online, starting today with Strategy. Even if you just offer services for others rather than building your own sites I think you can take a lot of value from this.

Having an outlined strategy that shows the path you are going to take to success is one of the most effective yet under-utilised website building tactic. It’s something many webmasters simply miss out because it takes time and isn’t necessarily enjoyable.

With that mindset however, you may be missing out on certain opportunities and fail to miss goals you’ve set yourself. Only recently have I set out a proper strategy for running this blog and my other websites; all will now be revealed.

Types of Websites

The types of websites that you are interested in or build will greatly affect your game plan and how you operate online. For an idea of what is out there, here are some of the most popular types of websites:

• Blogs - Regularly updated and rely heavily on authors and community building
• Forums - Very community orientated and usually around a niche topic
• E-Commerce Stores - This can be selling your own products, being an addition to an offline entity or a dropshipping solution
• Web Based Services - These can include anything from email, accounting solutions, company organisation and tracking software to actually being a web host or other inernet service provider
• Information Resources - Sites that specifically offer information on a certain niche and tend to get a lot of relevant search engine traffic

There are many more website types out there but these are some of the most popular and profitable. In order to benefit from the following section, you really should have an idea of the types of sites you want to create or which category your current websites fit into.

Goals

Goals can be short-term or long-term, and their main usage is to help you keep track of your success and see whether you are meeting your targets.

Of course, goals will be different things for different people. In terms of this blog, within the next few months (short term) I want to have over 1,000 feed subscribers. In the long term, that goal might be 10,000 feed subscribers or a certain income level.

I seriously recommend that somewhere, whether it be on paper or in a text file on your desktop, you write down realistic goals that you would like to achieve from your internet empire. These can be focused on things such as:

• Traffic Levels
• Website Earnings
• Feed Subscribers
• No. of Product Sales

Or anything else that you can measure.

Values

Besides simply setting goals, you should have your own values on how you want to act to help you achieve them. For instance, I would never promote a poor company or product just to make a few extra bucks via affiliation with them. However, some bloggers like John Chow do that on a daily basis and in-turn we have a very different audience.

Consider other factors, would you put up a decent website that does a job, and as long as it’s earning money not continue to improve it? If you are teaching people something are you trying to squeeze every last penny out of them or are you giving them a helpful, affordable solution to their problems?

My person values include:

1. Write for website visitors, not just for search engines
2. Respect the privacy of anyone contacting me or companies needing my help
3. Making the visitors experience my priority and then allow the earnings to follow
4. Not employing any shady or unethical tactics to get ahead of any online competitors

Once again, you may want to write these down sometime as there can be times when you wonder if you are being true to yourself and your core values with your actions.

Outline Tasks & Requirements

Due to the fact that the only downside in my skillset (there will be a post on this) is programming, I tend to do most of the jobs myself. However, for everyone else that hasn’t hindered their social life to learn everything they can about internet marketing and being a webmaster there are certain routes you can take.

First of all you need to decide whether you want to work on a project yourself or hire others to do the leg work, of course this will depend on your availability and financial situation. I often hire others to do link-building, not because I can’t do it, but because it gives me time to focus on other areas I enjoy working on more. I didn’t always have this luxury though so you may have to work hard to learn the skills and then spend your spare time implementing them. I’ve consistently worked 18 / 19 hour days to build my websites to where they are now so I’m certainly not promising any of this is going to be easy.

When you are starting a new site you will need to look at things like:

• Website Design
• Logo Design
• Programming / Script purchases where applicable
• Networking in your niche
• Sources of potential traffic
• Perform on-page SEO & Build backlinks

Not all of these are relevant for every type of website, for example if I’m building a site that offers MySpace layouts I’m not going to need to network that much in my niche. Take time to work out which tasks are required, which you are going to do and which you are going to outsource to others.

To summarise all this:

• Decide on the types of website(s) you are going to build
• Set yourself goals you can track
• Stick to your core values
• Outline tasks to perform and work out which ones you are going to do

I hope you enjoyed the start of this series, I’m also going to be covering Organisation, Taking Chances, Motivation and Building Your Skillset.

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