Our guest author Don Seibert outlines a few points to consider when you are developing your small business Internet Marketing Plan. These same points may also help to ensure that you are “found” on the internet.

Read the following article and apply the tips that Don is suggesting.

Enjoy!

TnT Dynamic Duo

Getting Started on Your Small Business Internet Marketing Plan

By Don Seibert

If you are just now developing your small business Internet marketing plan, there are a few things that you should do to gain some rudimentary experience and understanding of the Internet market.

Many a vary sharp businessperson has been so intimidated by the thought of marketing on the Internet that they fail to take advantage of one of the world’s best and least expensive marketing platform. We hope to simplify things greatly and overcome some of this natural resistance!

Almost everybody these days is familiar with performing a simple search on Google, Yahoo or Bing. It has pretty much become a tool that everybody uses to find information on any kind of topic. So, this is perhaps a good place to start.

Go to Google and enter a term describing the industry of your small business. When you get the results page, take a look at the top of the search results to see just how many search results there are for your term. The more results, the bigger your industry and if there are only a few thousand results, yours is not a very competitive niche. After you do this a bit, you will find that, the more narrowly you can define your business, the fewer the search results.

For example, if you are in the furniture business and you simply search on “furniture”, you will see more than 190 million results. However, when I search on “baby furniture”, only about 40 million results are found. If my business specializes in baby crib mattresses and I search on that term, I will find only about 1 million results! You can see how quickly we were able to zero in on a specific sub-niche. That is what you will have to do in order to compete favorably on the Internet.

Your small business Internet marketing plan, then must define the various niches and sub-niches in which you will compete and must develop a strategy for winning business and attracting customers in each of your specialty sub-niches. This is really pretty simple and need not be overwhelming at all.

Another interesting thing that you can glean from this exercise is a feel for how competitive a market exists online for your company’s products and services. As you look at the search results that appear on your various searches, observe the number of Pay-Per-Click ads that appear on the rightmost column of the search results page. These little, 4 line text ads were placed there by companies in your niche who are advertising for business using the Pay-Per-Click advertising program provided by the search engine company (Google, Yahoo, or Bing, for example). In such a program, you too can have your ad appear whenever a specific term, or “Keyword” is searched upon. Whenever a person clicks on that ad, two things happen. The site visitor is sent directly to your website and you are charged a small fee (usually 25 cents to 1 dollar).

While this may be an interesting marketing approach for you, keep that in your mind for later use when you are more familiar with the process. (If you embark on this too early and without sufficient background, it can be very expensive and ineffective.) For now, simply note how many ads appear on the right column for each of your searches. If there are only one or two ads there, your market has not yet matured on the Internet, but if there are hundreds of advertisers, you can bet that lots of people are making money using this approach in your market. It will simply give you a little more knowledge about your market.

Like all avenues of market research, keep good notes of what you find in your searches. You can certainly glean tremendous knowledge about your market that will help you once you develop your small business Internet marketing plan.