My Web Site Marketing and Internet Marketing Story
By John Howley

I decided 17 years ago to get into mailorder and direct marketing. I left the east coast and headed to Los Angeles to work with BBT Mail Order which sold spiritual books and products from India. My background from college was studying accounting and economics. I also studied music and religion. I decided to get into web site marketing and Internet marketing several years ago

I then tried to learn as much as I could about the direct marketing subject. I read what books the company had on the subject (15 or so) and starting buying what ever books I though were excellent on copy-writing, advertising and direct mail. A friend of mine had a huge mail order company selling Macs so I went back to New Jersey for two weeks and sat in their office to learn how they shipped the computer out, did order processing and customer service. I also learned how to use a computer and how to do the accounting on a computer.

I then went to a seminar on fund raising, mail order and direct marketing in Detroit by one of the main experts on direct marketing in the country, Sri Kumar Poddar, who helped do some major campaigns for the Democratic Party and had a huge magazine subscription business. For two days straight he explained the step by step how to raise money by direct marketing. He also gave me a list of excellent books to get on direct marketing which I purchased and read.

One of his main principles was that before you try to raise money for a charity or do business is first you need to have proper accounting techniques and he broke down fund raising into three steps which businesses can also follow.

1. Do proper accounting and look to see if some of the expenses that you have now are not needed.
2. Looks at the ways you are doing things and see if you can do them in another way where you can reduce the expense of them.
3. Start selling or asking for donations knowing that you have a sound business plan.

The point I am making here is the more you know about direct marketing the better. For an Internet business is usually a direct marketing company that you have your catalog and order entry system on the Internet instead of having a print catalog. Using the Internet does make it a bit easier because the customer fills in the order form without talking to anyone and all you have to do is print out the invoice.

Mr. Poddar made one major point which was it is amazing how many people go into a direct marketing business without hardly any budget for marketing. He suggested that some businesses should be willing to spend as much as 50% of their budget on marketing, while in truth many businesses would set aside 10% of less.

It is especially important for an Internet business to set aside a budget for marketing. One great thing about the Internet that if your business can get highly ranked on the search engine for your keywords you can get tons of free advertising. But to be able to get highly ranked you will have to give an investment of time.

The last and most likely the most important point that Mr. Poddar made was that it will cost you three to ten times the work to get a customer in your door as it does to keep them there, which means two thing. One that you have to work harder and spend more time to get a customer to buy from you the first time. Two that you should have such good service and products that the customer will be glad to keep purchasing from you steadily.

In general I would think that a person who is already doing a mail order business or store is the best candidate to start a mail order business on the Internet. For one these businesses already have experience and also they have an inventory already. Therefore they do not have to worry as much about cash flow because to start most people will have to put a good amount of time learning about web sites and also you will have to put a good amount of time marketing your site.

I have taught many computer classes and one of the main points that I try to express is that a computer usually can only help you to do more efficiently something you can already do without the computer.

A computer package like Quicken can automate many of the accounting tasks but you still have to know many of the accounting principles to do it perfectly. A person with a creative tendencies and an artist is more suited to be a graphic designer then other people. I might know Fireworks, Photoshop, PageMaker and DreamWeaver that all do graphic art, but that using them does not make me a web designer. To become a good web designer most people will have to take classes on design or read books on this subject.

I also personally learned several programs on the computer. Word, PageMaker, Coral Draw, Photoshop, Excel and Quicken. The more computer programs that you know can only help you in doing an Internet site or business.

When I started doing Internet pages several years ago. I learned FrontPage. Later because most of the professional web people I knew suggested I use DreamWeaver I started using a DreamWeaver (which I can highly suggest) and Firework to work on web pages.

I read an assortment of books on making web pages including books on HTML, CGI and PHP. I also practiced making web pages. What I realized after a year was that I was not a web designer or a high level programmer, so this is not where I should put my time investment. I though for myself that I should invest my time into making useful content and if I needed to get design done for my site I would hire professional to do work for me.

I also wanted some basic interactive things on my sites. Such as the ability for people to enter their email address, do survey and a guestbook. At first I tryed to have a web designer do this work. But now many hosts including Yahoo! offer these facilities for a small extra fee, therefore if something goes wrong with these facilities then your web host can quickly fix them without you even knowing about it.

Web marketing can be a bit tough because it can be hard to find information that is coming from a source that is unbiased. When you receive information on the Internet you are often trying to tell what is the writer’s angle. It is hard to find any good books on the subject in a book store. I sure have not found any good ones. So therefore you have to learn a lot by asking friends who are experienced,

I started out doing my web site on India Travel about five years ago. I have and still have the best and largest site about India travel on the Internet. But one typical mistake I made was to assume that if you have the best site on a subject you will naturally have plenty of people viewing your site. Which to a certain amount is true, but it sure does not mean you are going to have a popular site or rank high on the search engines.

My next web site was Vegetarian-Restaurants.net which lists vegetarian restaurants and health food stores around the world. I took a different path with marketing on this site.

Before I began it I went to see a friend of mine who was a web marketing consultant and asked him how I should start. I realized that before starting a web site that you should start thinking about how to market. it He then told me first you should start with your domain name. He then did some searches on available names and we came up with Vegetarian-Restaurants.net which is both good for the key words it contain, which totally describes what the site is about and is good for search engines that take into considered the domain name of the site. Plus it is easy to remember.

He then checked to see what words I should use as my major keywords and told me that I should use them in the first few paragraphs of each page, in the title and in the description of the site

He then explained to me the importance of getting incoming links to get high PageRank with search engines such as Google. So the first thing I set up on my site was a link directory and as I continued to do the site, I started constantly looking for possible sites that I could exchange links with.

He also gave me some ideas of what I should say in the letter that I sent out to webmasters asking for links.

He also told me not to make the mistake of using frames to design pages but that the search engines liked tables much more and often hated frames.

I followed many things that he told me and it really helped me. Now for many Google keyphrases I come up number one on the first pages and for vegetarian restaurants I usually come up three on the number one page of Google.

The point I am making is that you have to be prepared to do some hard work to be successful on the Internet but also more important the more knowledge you have to proceed the easier and more successful you will be. Hopefully you can learn from the mistakes that I made and knowledge that I compiled over the last five years.

Also it would be highly appreciated that if someone wants to give their experience on web marketing to please send in your viewpoint to spiritualguides@hotmail.com

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