There do not seem to be many threads in this area. Maybe this will help?
I suggest that use of affiliates is an excellent way of generating sales, but this should not be the only way. Also, the start-up cost of using the major companies is far too high for many businesses to contemplate. I recommend that an affiliate scheme should be created after web promotion has been used. This is a relatively cheap way of testing the water, before spending more money.
A website for a business does need to be promoted to keep ahead of the opposition, or maybe to catch up with them. I recommend a combination of Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click and some grunt work.
SEO is fine for the people with the time to do it. The ground rules keep changing, and they are different for each search engine, so it is a major challenge to be top of the pile on more than one search engine. Hits from
SEO work as essentially free though once the initial work has been done, so some time and money spent on
SEO must be worthwhile. Each page on your site must have titles and descriptions that are unique, otherwise search engines will not effectively index the pages.
PPC can be expensive, but is an efficient way of gaining hits and raising the ranking of a web site. The more web sites that link to yours the better. You have to have a good web site if you are to use PPC. There is no point in paying people to visit a site that is poorly presented or that has poor content. Your margin on sales should be used to determine the effectiveness of PPC. If margins are low (less than 20%?) and the value of sales is low (less than GBP 20.00), then PPC may be too expensive. If margins are high and the value of sales is high, then use of PPC is an absolute must, a no brainer! The middle ground is more difficult to call.
Keywords need to be chosen carefully. I prefer a blend of popular and unusual keywords, rather one or two hot ones. The keywords for PPC are likely to be the same as those for
SEO, so there is an overlap. Be very careful on Google Adwords. Always impose a daily limit on spend, otherwise the cost could be huge! Please take a look at
www.metatune.com for more ideas and information on
SEO and PPC.
The grunt work is getting your site listed on as many directories as possible. This will help the ranking of your site, and generate some hits as well. Many directories will only list you as a result of PPC, but others are free, and some do both. It is always worth searching around and finding another directory on which to get listed. Please take a look at
www.admax.co.uk, which is my own directory. There are lots of others, particularly in the retail area. Why not have a links page that gives details of all the directories that list your site? Alternatively, give a prominent listing on your site of directories that list your site. This should give your site more credibility.
There is another overlap on the above. You will need titles (< 36 chars, < 80 chars), descriptions (< 48 chars, < 80 chars, < 160 chars, < 240 chars) and keywords (short list, long list) for all the above. The choice of words is very important for all of them. The title and description are key in making people want to visit your site. The words used are key as they will be indexed by search engines, so they must contain the desired keywords. It saves a lot of time creating a text document with your titles, descriptions, keywords. You can then cut and paste from this. You may need several documents, one per target market.
I hope that the above is useful and informative.
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