Often, when I speak to people about optimizing their online web presence, they have a very vague comprehension of the process this involves. Unfortunately, many businesses are still under the impression that because they already have a website, then they do not need to do much more in terms of online promotion.

In reality, developing a website is only an early step. What businesses must understand is that, just like traditional marketing, Internet marketing also needs to begin with a plan. Therefore, the first step is defining the business objectives. What does the business hope to achieve by investing in online promotion? Setting short term targets like generating x amount of sales or visits is very helpful.

When this has been done, a website can be developed that takes these goals into consideration. For example, developing an e-commerce website is different from developing an educational website.

After the website is done and it is published online, the process of generating a return from it begins. I call this the Online Promotion Process, which is made up of four steps:

• Attraction – Making people come over and visit
• Analytics – Seeing how poeple are interacting with your website
• Conversion – Getting them to do what you want on your website
• Retention – Strengthening the relationship with customers increasing their lifetime value

Keeping the process in mind is helpful when seeing how to increase the return from your website, be it more demand for advertisiing space or simply more subscriptions to your online service. In other words, the process helps you better understand and serve your target market.

I shall be writinng in more detail on the above steps in the near future. In the meantime, if you can add value to this article, please share your thoughts in the comments section.