As we discussed previously there are 3 golden rules to internet marketing that if you follow will increase your chance of success when you promote your website on-line, if you do not follow these golden rules you will fail, I am sorry but that is just the way it is, these are rules and they need to be followed.

The 3 golden rules

Are the keywords you are trying to rank for being searched for by customers?

Are people the people doing these searches people who are going to buy?

Can you compete in this market?

So it is time for you to become a psychic and see if you can tell what people are going to buy from your website, sounds almost impossible how do you know what people are thinking?

There are a few ways you can tell if a person is considering buying a product or if they are just checking for information, the easiest way is to look at the keywords they are using to conduct their searches.

If you search for “Jokes” in the search engines you will find lots of competing sites but very few of them are selling anything they are jus fun pages for people to visit, there are also very few advertisements on the search engines for this term, that shows that people are unwilling to pay to get traffic to to the joke sites as they do not make a return from these visitors.

If you search for “Insurance quotes” you will see lots of sites and lots of advertisements for you to click on as the insurance companies know you are looking for an expensive product that they can sell you.

So just by checking the number of advertisers for a term you can see how much money there is in a given market.

You need to have money in a market to make it worth competing in or your efforts will result n you breaking golden rule number 2 and ending up with no profits from your marketing efforts.

The three golden rules of internet marketing are

Are the keywords you are trying to rank for being searched for by customers?

Are people the people doing these searches people who are going to buy?

Can you compete in this market?

So the first question to ask is are the keywords you are hoping to rank for attracting the right number of visitors.

Visitors are different from searches as it has been estimated that 50% of the searches made by people do not result in a click to a website, think about how you search for a company, you might use a broad term such as search engine optimisation, when you get back 25 million results you may think that is too many to sort through and decide that you wish to discuss your SEO and on-line marketing with someone in your area so you add the word Salisbury to the search to research for the term search engine optimisation Salisbury, this brings up a smaller more focused list.

So if you are using a keyword tool and looking at the number of searches you should half that number and consider that if you hold the top position in Google for that term you should expect to get just 40% of the total number of searches.

Once you know this you can use this figure to predict your visitor numbers to your site, using the other two golden rules of Internet marketing along side this one will increase your chances of success dramatically.

What are customer reviews? – Reviews and ratings of products or services by customers, so that other people interested in that product or service can use the information as part of their buying decision. You can see examples of this on Ebay or Amazon where the sellers get reviewed.

Using Customer Reviews to promote your business – Customer reviews allow people to leave comments about the quality of a product or service, this can build confidence in the customer and can lead to more sales. Positive comments are likely to persuade potential customers to buy and may also provide further information about a product that wasn’t previously included on the page.

Be careful – It can swing the other way. If you’re products or services are poor then you may be caught out by this. Competitors or disgruntled former employees may post bad comments to damage the business, so you need to have a system where you can regularly check the comments and feedback left, any that are unfair or rude will need to be removed, although if the comment is fair but not a good review you may like to leave it on as a site with just positive reviews may look like they have faked the feedback.