Internet Marketing - and Web 2.0

So how much does your Internet Marketing course deal with Web 2.0?

Well it is an interesting question, as I've been doing talks on both Web 2.0 and internet marketing for a while now, and there is a significant amount of cross-over between the content of the two presentations.

Web 2.0 is a funny beast - possibly more hype than fact in many ways. Its name implies that the web has changed, and while the web does change every day, there was never a step. With regards to marketing a business, the core values have never changed, and if I were to paraphrase people with much longer histories than myself in the Internet marketing game I would say the process consists of:

1. Find out what people are searching for on line.
2. Find a solution that meets their needs.
3. Offer that solution.

OK that was the difficult bit, it gets easier from here:

4. Write compelling sales copy that leads towards a sale.
5. Bring people quickly to your site with PPC advertising.
6. Learn which keywords actually lead to sales.
7. Optimise your site for those keywords to bring the longer term and higher volume organic search traffic.
8. Build content and links, then more content and more links to bring that traffic your way.
9. Bring your visitors back many times using social networking and Email Marketing.
10. Develop credibility and trust to build a strong relationship.
11. Sell to your people what you know they need, and then sell them more based on your knowledge of them.

Which brings us back to Web 2.0.
So if those are the basics, where does Web 2.0 fit in?

Well here are some of the topics that we cover that are "Very Web 2.0"

The aspects of web 2.0 that we deal with, as supporting increased profits from a business web site include:
1. Using Social sites for developing high quality inbound links and traffic to your web site.
2. Using blogging to attract the attention of search engines, and for a more relaxed approach to developing the relationship with your customer.
3. API based tools including the Keyword research tools are very web 2.0, and they provide us with vital information about who is searching for our product or service, and allow us to understand how to alter our web sites in order to bring that traffic to us.
4. Tagging and cloud type components that make our sites more accessible to search engines.
5. Forums and Wikis that help us provide valuable and fresh content to our users, and to develop our sites with user generated content. This reduces the effort involved in keeping our sites clean and fresh.
6. Using RSS and syndication both to add relevant content to our own sites, and to add incoming links, traffic and improved Pagerank to our own sites.
7. Using Tagging and Linking sites such as Digg, Technorati and Squidoo and others to increase traffic and sales to our sites.
8. Turning one-time visitors into long term customers and friends using social networking as a relationship building tool.
9. Applying web 2.0-type standards to the design of our sites to improve the user’s experience, accessibility, and search engine ranking.
10. Using techniques that can turn our marketing tactics viral – i.e. to make our promotions spiral outwards on the net with little or no effort of our own. When these are applied correctly they can exponentially increase the success of a site.
11. Effective use of press release and Article marketing to increase page rank, traffic, and sales.

Link to the "Channel Computing - Internet Marketing Course" page.

For those that are still guessing I think we'll have another post now, entitled "what is Web 2.0?"... because most are by no means certain!