The first step to increasing sales is increasing traffic. Bottom line, that’s what social media does for you. It increases your traffic – if you do it right.
Actually, there are three primary benefits to social media marketing:
- Increased traffic to your website
- Reputation management
- Audience engagement and relationship building
Each of these benefits is very distinctive, but they all lead to the same end road. If you manage your reputation online well then it will lead to more traffic going to your website and inevitably to more sales. Building relationships and engaging with your audience likewise will deliver more traffic to your website, leading to more sales.
As you can see, multiple benefits often lead to a positive end result. When it comes to online marketing you cannot afford to sit idle. Be proactive, don’t be afraid to venture out from your virtual doorstep, and meet the day.
On another note, by stepping outside of your comfort zone (and your own domain), you show potential customers that you are willing to meet them half way. You’ll certainly earn a lot more respect for that. And being social is a great way to drive traffic back to your website and increase your sales.
Social media marketing is like a microcosm of marketing in general. In the sense that you can drive traffic to where you want it using the proper social media marketing channels, you can run an effective marketing campaign in just a few hours a week. But how does the traffic flow?
We recommend that you use social networking like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the many other social networking sites online to drive traffic to your blog. You then use your blog to attract opt-in subscribers to your e-mail list. And you use your e-mail marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your sales pages.
If you use this model you will find that your sales pages will receive the most conversions. Your e-mail blasts will receive a fair number of conversions but not as many as your sales landing pages. Your blog will also receive a decent number of conversions but not as many as your e-mail campaigns. Your social networking profiles will receive the fewest conversions, but they will be a primary driver of traffic to your blog.
This is called a sales funnel. Establish your sales funnel and then work it to achieve the results you want to achieve. You can do that with social media as well as anything else.
So you’ve done a good job getting your web pages to rank in the search engines. You’re at the No. 1 spot with several of your most important keywords and you’re in the No. 2 and No. 3 spots for several others. You’re even getting a good load of traffic from your keywords. But what about sales? Zero. Zilch. Nada. None, right?
Welcome to the Internet marketer’s eternal dilemma. You’ve learned the most important lesson the hard way. Search engine optimization is important, but it’s not the holy grail.
If you expect to make it in the world of Internet marketing, you’ve got to do more than just manage your keywords well. You’ve got to build web pages that sell products and services. You’ve got to convert traffic to sales. And if you don’t, well, then you aren’t really doing what a marketer should be doing. Simply ranking well won’t pay the bills.
Instead of focusing all of your efforts on keywords and search engine rankings, try to figure out what converts traffic to sales. If you can nail that down and still rank your pages well in the search engines then you’ll start making the money. Just don’t expect too much until then.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a powerful method of making money. Unique to online marketing, it consists of more than building a website and watching them come. SEM involves testing, driving traffic, and closing sales by generating leads through pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, and paid inclusion forms of search engine marketing.
SEM is not new. Even before Google and pay per click advertising, online marketers were using search engines to build their businesses. But SEM has become more sophisticated. It is a science as much as an art.
At its most effective, SEM can build your business in a splash, but most businesses see their revenues climb steadily. The first step to effective SEM is to build a well optimized website with a good clean design and ready to convert traffic to sales. If your website isn’t ready to convert then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to it. It will all be lost opportunities.
When it comes to SEM, the best place to start is with a plan. And if you have trouble coming up with a plan on your own, you might want to consider an SEM consultant.
