Marketing an Online Business
By Abdi Mohammed

Marketing an online business needn't be a boring task. Do you know what message you want to send about yourself, your product and your business? If you do not then how can your potential customers know? Broadly speaking therefore, marketing is all about getting your message across. All businesses, however small, need to market their product and should be focused on generating direct responses, on building communications with your target group of customers rather than worrying too much about image generation.

As described above, you should have a clearly defined message - predominately about your product; this bodes well for both online and offline businesses, as the underlying principles are the same. The following should therefore be considered:

1. Who is the message to? By this we mean your target market. Who are your potential customers? You need this information at your fingertips from a very early stage of planning your business and hence a key concept.

2. What is your message? The two main components of your message are the long-term reputation you want to build for your product or online business. Secondly, the specific message you want to get across now. This could simply be a description of your online business.

3. How to send the message? There are numerous methods of trying to get across your message to your target audience; the trick is to select the most cost-effective way of reaching your group. Marketing an online business is not a whole lot different from the marketing of an offline business. The core principles are the same, but the methodologies differ slightly. For example, instead of writing an advert in a newspaper you might put one up on a classified ads site or put up an online press release.

Marketing and advertising are synonymous and go hand in hand. Advertising tackles the problem of 'How to send the message'. Advertising can create attention, inform, remind, prompt sales and improve the image of your product. But the return from advertising is uncertain. Do not, therefore, rely on one form of advertising to achieve your objectives; if you can afford it use a mixture. The beauty of online marketing is that it is relatively easy to track the performance of your advertising, e.g. use a unique URL for each advertising method and track individual hits.

The above is some general information on marketing an online business but I would now like to give my top 3 tips specific to online businesses:

• Think LONG and HARD about your target market. Find out where they congregate online (forums?).
• Draw up a MARKETING PLAN according to your target market and budget. This doesn't have to be anything elaborate; a simple piece of paper with the right information would suffice. If you have little experience, or are having troubles, then don't be afraid to ask someone
• TEST and TRACK your marketing efforts and update your marketing plan as you go along. There is nothing wrong with changing the plan!

Abdi Mohammed is an online entrepreneur who has discovered the wonderful opportunities the Internet offers. A university graduate living in the UK, Abdi, has been involved in a number of online and offline businesses. After much hard work and testing, Abdi now only involves himself with businesses that are automated and have a proven system. His expertise cover Economics, Business and Wealth Creation. Proven Online Business

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