Note from the Editor

One of the things I’ve learned in my home business is to really work the marketing aspects of it. It doesn’t matter if I can write content more easily - without a good marketing plan not much comes of it.

Today’s article comes from my thoughts as I have gone through a process of deciding how much time I have and which sites I really want to focus on. It can be hard reassessing goals for your sites, but well worth it.

And yes, I did pick some to drop marketing efforts on. Haven’t decided whether to sell the domain names or not, but for now I just won’t do anything for the sites I don’t have the time to run properly. My other sites will be benefitting accordingly.

Online Survival Tactics

Not all websites are going to survive and thrive. That’s just the nature of things. Sometimes you’ll hit your target niche just right and other times you’ll miss. And while some of the time you can fix the problem, other times you may try and try before deciding it’s just not your niche.

That’s not to say give up the instant a site doesn’t take off. It can take years. But if you’re developing a range of sites, sometimes dropping a poorly performing one can be a wise business decision. Just make sure you have the time to give all your sites a fair try first.

What constitutes giving your sites a fair try? Building them, testing them and marketing them, of course. And there are some basic marketing tactics that can help each of your sites to survive.

You don’t have to do all of these personally, of course. If you have the budget and the inclination, outsourcing some of the more tedious aspects can be very helpful. But for all of your sites you should try your best to do some solid marketing.

1. One site per topic.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you can only promote one product per website. If that were the case, Amazon would be in a lot of trouble. But don’t try to be Amazon; you don’t have the budget for that.

What you do want to do is have a distinct focus for each site. You want people to come to each of your sites for a particular reason. Draw them in by interest and sell products and services accordingly.

What does work is to review or discuss each product or service on its own page. This ensures you have a number of pages on your site, as well as tightly themed pages for each individual item. This is more friendly to search engine traffic and to customers.

2. Get visitors to sign up for your newsletter whenever possible.

Not everyone is going to buy the first time they visit your website. In fact, it is said that it takes on average about 7 exposures to a product for most people to make a buying decision. If you have a newsletter or ecourse for them to sign up for, you have more shots at making the sale. Much better than relying strictly on search engine traffic.

Your newsletter or ecourse should give solid information, so that subscribers stick with you and you have more chances to pitch your products. If all you do is advertise, people will quickly hit the delete or unsubscribe button.

3. Write, write, write.

Or pay someone to do it for you if writing is not one of your talents.

The more articles or blog posts you can add to your websites, the better. The more regularly you can submit quality articles to article directories, the better.

Quality is always a major issue. Once again, you cannot just be writing ads. People will ignore you.

Write articles that will attract visitors to your website who are interested in what you have to offer. Once they hit your website you will have the chance to sell to them. Putting the sales pitch into the main body of the article is just begging for people to ignore your articles.

4. Learn to use social bookmarks.

This can be quite time consuming, but very beneficial. If you’ve been a webmaster for long, you’ve probably heard about sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and so forth. If you use these well, the traffic from them can be amazing. In the case of Digg, it can be server-crashing amazing, so be careful if you’re aiming for that. You’ll want to watch out for success.

While there are many other things you can do to help your websites to succeed, these are likely to give your site a fighting chance for survival in the cutthroat world of online business. Most niches are pretty tough, often with many sites fighting for the top spots. Know what you can handle and how many sites you can realistically manage in the style you are comfortable with. A few well managed, well marketed sites can bring in more than dozens of poorly managed, unmarketed websites. It’s your choice.

Technorati Tags: online survival tactics, online marketing, website marketing, article marketing