SEO Evangelist (Part 1): Designing a marketing plan

Something crucial about starting a web business is to design a marketing plan.
Can you work without a marketing plan? Yes, but you won’t succeed.

To make it as simple as possible, we will take a simple example.
Let’s assume you have a shop that sells mobile phones. You wanted to expand your business and try to sell phones through the Internet. If you go without a marketing plan, you’ll simply ask a designer to create a website for you. As phones changes in models and prices each day, it needs to be an interactive website using a server side language and a database.

The result is: you’ll spend at least $2,000. Don’t forget about the hosting costs. Another great result is: You will get 0 sales. Reason is you have no visitors.
Because you just know that the Internet is a website, that you considered it sufficient to build your entire business.

The web is much more than a web page. It’s a whole story; it is millions of people working daily on getting things done. And they are interested on more than a webpage.

The right solution is to go through a marketing plan. Those people (Internet Marketers) charge a lot. But if they are smart, they’ll make you grow faster.

Marketing will discuss the website design, the website feel and look, the website functionalities… Things developers don’t care about.

Marketing in later step, will discuss things like Social Media. How a post should integrate social widgets, strategies to spread the word about the product on social media sites.

Marketing will also take care of SEO and strategies like long-term and free traffic. Marketing may suggest the creation of a blog and the addition of content to attract more search engine traffic and build a reader base.

There are few things on the Internet that can help you grow your business.

• Word Of mouth: Priceless, the information is spread through Instant Messaging, Twitter, Emails, SMS or simple contact. It doesn’t mean quality, but a good idea that made it spread quickly and vastly.


• Search Engine Traffic: At first, it costs a lot. But when traffic comes and Google give its juice: just forget about anything else. Search Engine traffic is generally targeted and will convert well.


• Social Media Traffic: Paying whenever you ask for it, unless you are the power user yourself (so you can charge for it!). Power users in sites like digg, Stumble Upon… will help you spread your product virally and in short time, however, a click can cost $600!!

You should care about those big three, so if one didn’t work (like getting banned from Google), the others will replace it and you aren’t kicked of the market.

In our blog we are going to focus more on Search Engine traffic. Search Engine traffic tends to be more targeted and steady, plus it’s free! Also it’s easier to get banned from a social network than from Google.

Inclined? Skip to the next part: Optimizing your website.