Defining a strategy to market your website is the key to building a solid foundation for your internet marketing campaign.
You must know where you are going in order to get to where you want to go.
Having a specific direction for your marketing campaign can maximize the return value that you see on your efforts. Ask yourself what do you want your website to achieve? What do you define as success? Give yourself attainable goals that build steps towards your long term success, ideally you should have 3 goal checklists, fuzzy, sharp and laser.
Fuzzy goal checklists are generalized pie in the sky, 40,000 foot view ideas or mission statements about your website or company, something like "The best website in the world", "fastest growing company in north america" or "number 1 internet marketing company". These are goals that are simply way out in never never land that you should strive to attain but are not the laser focused goal of your company or website. A good example comes from Google: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Sharp goal checklists are shorter term goals that you want to achieve with your product, service, company or website that are typically less than a year or two off that help to get you to your mission statement. A good example would be the delivery of a major version revision of your mainline software or product.
Laser goal checklists encompass the daily, weekly or monthly key goals that you must achieve in order to deliver your yearly goals, items such as hiring key personnel or for a sole proprietor, micro or small business owner could be something like learning a web development language such as HTML, CSS, PHP or ASP.net so that you can modify your own website instead of outsourcing simple changes that might take days or weeks for your outsourced development team to deliver, but that you can accomplish in a matter of minutes or hours.
Before beginning any marketing strategy either online or off it is always best to learn the medium and the players that you are interested in. For online marketing campaigns you should for example learn how to use the service, the key / core / evangelist users and how and why they are successful, friend them and help to market their stuff.
By helping other core users on a website you establish yourself as someone that they can count on to help deliver their message and over time gain their trust so that they will reciprocate, a great example being digg and sphinn.
In every niche there are a core set of evangelist users that hold up that niche and no matter how small or large that niche is the core users should always be your target audience as they have the influence over the rest of the market that make up that niche. Do your research into what these people need and want and your road to marketing to them becomes that much easier.
Specific website marketing ideas:
Does your niche not have a centralized location or is fragmented into several smaller communities? If so, consider building them a community.
Is your niche missing tools or services that you can delivery for free or at a small cost?
Can you build a better tool that is the current encumbent or perhaps build an addon to the market leading software or service?
The key here is to think outside the box and deliver real value to your audience.
Next week we will explore advanced marketing ideas and stategies.
That's All For Now,
The Boca Raton SEO Guy