What Do You Need To Look Into When Doing Any E-Marketing Campaign - Just The Essentials

So you want it all and you want it fast?

That's the world we live in - microwave ovens, drive throughs, fast food, fast cars, emails and no time to waste. So here are the main points.......... the things you should prepare to look into when launching an E-Marketing campaign (total online solution).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - doing correct key word research and optimizing pages (and landing pages) for those key words. Tracking and reporting (for constant tweaking).

Online Advertising (SEM) - can be done through Search Engine Advertising. Google and Yahoo are the main ones I use and are most effective in my experience. Ensure you follow up on the results, use testing plus constantly tweak key words for best results.

Social Networks - have a presence on social networks such as mysapce and facebook (two largest in that order), bebo, uploading photos on Flickr, posting questions and answers on Yahoo Answers. But make sure you do some competitor research and have clear goals of what you want out of your involvement in social networks. For example a brand that may want to build its image will have a very different presence to a brand who wants to increase lead generation through its social network site. And as always ask your self what value are you adding to your members and is it fun?

Consider launching your brand in Virtual Worlds. Its yet to harvest real quantitative results, but definitely worth considering in your strategy.

Forums - enter forums that relate to your industry and brand and make constructive comments. Ensure your signature at the bottom of your post includes your brand or website.

Article Submission - consider listing articles as an 'expert' in places such as Ezine, Squidoo, Knol, Wikipedia and Digg it.

Use Social Weblinks - such as newsvine, bumpzee, furl netscape, yahoo buzz, MyWeb, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, technorati, BlinkList, ma.gnolia, reddit, trailrank, slashdot, blog catalog, and MyBlogLog.

List yourself on Google Maps.

Listings - List yourself for free in as many places as possible getting your website as many related forward links so that your website rates higher. You can do this by listing in online business directories and industry websites.

E-Newsletter - Send out E-Newsletters with links embedded in them. Its also a very cost effective way to stay in touch (and in the front of the mind) of your target audience in a personalised way.

Use Blogs! - User generated content is so important to people using the web now-a-days. Websites now-a-days should have certain sections that are always being updated. Web crawlers like that and it is picked up in the Google Algorithm giving you a higher page rank. Have sections such as: News and Events, videos, photos, foreign language pages and blogs with constantly new and interesting content to engage the visitor and involve them.

Database Marketing - You can use CRM's to help you do database marketing. Use your website to list build. Then communicate to those people personally using email marketing technologies, sms's etc.

Website Tracking - Ensure you have tracking (eg Google analytics) on every page so that you can track where visitors are coming from and other things like time spent on each page etc.

Of course all of these online marketing strategies need to be instigated with your target audience and aims in mind.

Please feel free to email me about your ideas on this article or any other good online marketing tools out there. The web is dynamic environment and in my opinion e-marketers should pool resources and information to help each other stay up to date on the latest.