Step 2 - Planning Small Business Marketing Online

If you have completed Step 1, you have organized the offline aspects of your business. You have the web site toolkit in hand to guide your thinking during web site construction.

Here's what comes next.

Anyone using a search engine uses keywords to find what they want. What you want to know is which keywords they use to find a business like yours. When you know those words, you begin to know your market.

Along with keywords, you also find out how often these words are used and how much competition you face. Look at this process as a market study to find out what web site content is needed to reach your target market, ahead of your competition.

One thing to know is this "research" process is the same regardless of what you are selling.

Wordtracker created a story around Virginia Veg, a fictional vegetable processing company that wants to sell vegetarian dog food online, and asked experts to tell how they would use Wordtracker to offer advice to Susan Webster, the CEO of the fictional company.

The challenges that Susan must face are the challenges that business owners and consultants must face every day.

It is more than a practical manual:

It is a unique insight into the thinking that allows marketing experts to get top results. There is no charge, just download here and read it completely.

This story teaches the basic fundamentals of how people really use the web. This information can "make or break" your online business. Without knowing keywords and how to use them, you will miss your target market.

Our service business has two sides. We create marketing plans and web sites from scratch and we fix failed ones. Repair is beyond any doubt the "bigger" side of our business. The vast majority of the time, failure was the direct result of not understanding the basic fundamentals of how people use the web.

When you fail to plan your online presence based on these basic fundamentals, your site is doomed from day 1.

And if your web site has failed already, here's what fixes broken web sites.

We have much more to discuss, but please download the story and save yourself major headaches. Next, we'll discuss vital resources for planning you must know about.