A Blueprint to get an effective online presence

Posted by imark | Under Marketing concepts, Search Engine Marketing Monday Jun 9, 2008

It’s rightly said that one of the biggest factors which ensures that any marketing campaign is a success is a good product to be marketed! A Marketer will consider his job half done if he has a quality product to market.

So before you start planning to chalk out your budget for marketing for your online venture, make sure you have a strong blueprint to get a successful product on hand.

Treat your online presence as if it’s a place in the real world. Then think how you would go about planning and preparing if you had to get a home or a shop built in the physical world. Believe me, the basic checklist remains the same, be it your home sweet home on the Earth or your website on www!

1) Once you have decided whether you need a Bungalow, a penthouse or a Flat the first thing you start looking for is a good location. (I will leave ‘what you need part to you. You are the best judge for what you need!). Similarly once you have decided what niche you want to be in or what business you want to start on the web, you will need to search for a good location, i.e. a good and reliable Hosting Service provider. Make a list of what service you would need, how many email accounts, how much web traffic you expect, etc. Then compare some of the service providers and select a good plan. Don’t fret to invest marginally more for good quality. It’s not everyday that you buy hosting service. And you won’t want to change it every now and then.

2) After finalizing the locality and land, you get down to the blueprint, the map or the drawing of the building (whatever you may call it), the actual layout. You may take help of an architect if you want a detailed drawing.
Similarly, once you have your hosting space done and you are ready for the work on putting into shape your website idea, get an outline of the website done. Take care of factors like the number of pages you want, how are you going to handle the navigation, basically the site map. Leave the beauty part out here. Colors, theme and the visual appeal will appear later.

3) After the architect gets your building blueprint ready, the actual brick and mortar work starts. On the website front that’s the actual coding. One thing to note here: If you are a business person or a non techie, leave the implementation details to your developer. Let him decide what’s best for you : PHP, ASP, joomla or drupal. You don’t tell the construction guy how thick the steel rods should be or what grade cement should be used. He knows it best.

4) Now that your home has a shape and you know how it’s coming up, you start taking care of the finishing, the interiors. What color goes best, should it be white, peach, you know that best. It’s your walls, your taste. Same goes with the website. Keeping some basic principles in mind choose your pages color, the font, the sidebars, the top bars’ colors. What banner goes best with your service or product, your tag line etc.

5) When its all done, its time for celebration, time to invite people, your near and dear ones, your colleagues to your place for housewarming or for just showing off ! This is the ‘internet marketing’ part. But before you do that you should make sure that things at your home are in place, its appealing to the visitors. This translates to the basic on- page SEO to please the Google bots! Ideally this part should be taken care of during the coding phase.

Spend time and efforts on building your product and take my word: You would enjoy the marketing part.

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