Dominate Your Local Market!

Back in the old days (you know, the late ’90s, early 2000s), all you had to do was put up a website, register it with Yahoo! and you were in business. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that simple, but you get the idea.

Over the years maintaining an effective online marketing program has been become more and more complicated. And more and more rewarding as consumers switch their business searches online.

These days, even ordering a pizza can become an online experience. The lesson is that every year it becomes more important to have an effective online marketing strategy. And very soon, maybe as soon as the next year or so, it will be a “do-or-die” necessity for most busineses.

Can I market effectively online?

Yes, you can. The basic elements of an online marketing strategy remain fairly simple even as implementing one has gotten more complex. Let’s talk about how to create a solid online marketing plan without the sugar-coated marketing hype you hear so often.

The three-legged marketing plan.

To keep things as simple, cost-effective and as potentially successful as possible, we can compare your online marketing program to a tripod supporting a very valuable object – your business. With all three legs in place, your strategy is stable and offers a solid platform to build on. Remove one of the legs and the chances of success drop dramatically.

The first leg of this plan is set a solid foundation for the other two. One thing that hasn’t changed in all these years is that you MUST have a website. But not just ANY website.

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The website is where you present your information in a way designed for visitors to find it easily. It must be simple to navigate and be easily expandable. Ideally changes can be made within minutes, not days or weeks… and this applies whether you take responsibility for your own updates or have your webmaster do it.

WordPress is the foundation to a successful online marketing plan

What makes WordPress such a powerful foundation to build your online marketing castle on? One factor is that right out of the box, with some simple changes to the default setup, WordPress is search-engine-friendly. Add a few plugins, configure them to maximize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and you leap light years ahead of the competition in the race for better ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.

Another is the wide range of plugins and themes available to customize the look and function of your WordPress-powered website.

Navigation is simple, forthright and is produced automatically as content is added. Automatic archiving of older information by date and category and an effective built-in search capability keep your content readily available.

There are literally thousands of themes that you can download from the WordPress themes website or from commercial websites such as MightyTemplates.com (click on “WordPress Themes” in the left column).

Likewise, thousands of plugins downloadable from the WordPress Plugins repository make adding functionality to your site a breeze.

To make the use of WordPress even more appealing, WordPress and most of the themes and plugind developed for it are Open Source – free for you to use. But free doesn’t mean you are on your own when it comes to support. OrangeCat.com and many other companies offer support packages to suit your needs.

And you have the support of the entire world-wide WordPress community behind you.

So that’s the first of the three legs of your oline marketing plan. We’ll be discussing the other two and building on this information in the days ahead. Stay with us to learn more about how to assure your business’s future by mastering online marketing.

In fact, sign up to be notified when we post new information and you’ll never miss an important post.

More from bobstovallcom

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