When looking to drive traffic to your website, the first item on any webmaster’s list is ‘Search Engines’ but a new force in traffic generation is ‘Social Media’ and not only can it give large amounts of pre-filtered users, it can also help with retention and loyalty – something that is often lost in the mercenary world of Search Engines.

Using Social Media allows you to connect with a targeted set of pre-filtered users that already share an affinity for your product and keep your site on their radar on a regular basis.

There are many Social Media sites and these are detailed in separate headings below, but despite the marked differences they share a common set of goals. Users will ‘subscribe’ to a feed that can be a company or an interest group and will read updates posted by the feed whenever they log onto their network. In posting regular, useful updates a feed can promote a company or a service and gather subscribers in a similar way to a traditional newletter. This is the process simplified but the potential for engagement varies from network to network.

Below are a number of the key movers in the Social Media arena. This is a fast evolving area and new sites are launching, often with specialised functions or niches to challenge the larger names.

- Facebook

This is the main social network, known by everyone. It is primarily a non-business environment but a corporate page can be a good way to engage with users.

- Twitter

Also well known. The character limit placed on posts means that an element of skill is needed to ensure that effective, unambiguous communication is made but the medium lends itself to regular small updates to retain user loyalty.

- Google +

A direct challenger to Facebook, it has the backing of Google and the promise of closer integration into Google’s many other products.

- LinkedIn

This is a specialist business network to enable business professionals to ‘network’ in the business sense of the word. Limited promotion here works best for B2B businesses.

- Youtube

The internet’s biggest video-sharing network. Particularly good for brands with products / services that can be best represented in video.

- Pinterest

For visually sharing elements of the internet with like-minded people this has a ‘craft’ or arts feel and works well with Fashion, Arts brands.

Also worth considering;

Instagram –  Picture sharing network

Vine – Short-video sharing network

To most people ‘Google’ means just the search engine, and this remains the most visible part of Google’s growing number of services. However, for the website owner there are several tools that can prove invaluable in running and maintaining a website.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

This is now the preeminent website analytics tool, requiring just a few lines of code to be added to your site and giving a vast array of different reports. Detailed analysis of website visitors, pages and usage patterns is essential to running a website and refining how users interact with it. Common tasks involve locating pages with missing files, entry and exit pages, and even linking through to Adwords to identify the best time to run adverts.

Google Maps

http://www.google.com/local/add/

Google Maps is a comprehensive mapping tool that is accessible via the main search engine and is often used to get directions or locate places. Within this it is also possible to list your business in the Google Local directory. This ensures your business will appear when local searches are carried out. You can add photos, and contact details to give a full overview of your business to search users.

Google Webmaster

https://www.google.com/webmasters/

For non-technical users, there can be a lot of information on here that needs interpretating, but Webmaster is an indispensible early-warning system for potential problems with your website. Anything that may impact the indexing of your website by Google’s ‘Googlebot’ is highlighted so that you, or your web-programmer can address the issues.

Google Keywords Tool

https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool

Although this tool is primarily intended for their paid Adwords programme, the Keywords tool makes an excellent research tool for keywords to integrate into your website content, title tags and description tag.  It give an exhaustive list of which words are searched and groups them by synonyms. Careful use of this tool can give you the best ideas for landing pages and product descriptions to maximise the potential visitors.

Currently we are in the middle of a profound change in the way ‘websites’ or ‘connected information’ is being consumed by customers and users. Up until a couple of years ago, the standard user was simple to define – they would sit at their desktop computer, open a web browser and navigate to a website – often at a standard resolution.

With the rise of Mobile Devices and Tablets that is no longer the case. The consumption of Connected Information can take place at wildly differing resolutions , on websites or Apps . As such there are 3 distinct strategies being employed in today’s marketplace.

1. No change.
Although not a progressive change, this can be a valid strategy. Many tablet devices have a similar resolution to a desktop machine and many mobile devices have no problem displaying a website designed for a higher resolution with the use of pinch-and-zoom gestures. The user experience can suffer as the view point is not tailored to their device and moving around the site and navigating around is much harder. The user may however prefer the familiarity of the desktop site and all of the functionality that can be missing on a cut-down version of the site ( see below ).

2. Device / Resolution Specific Apps / Websites
Designing a site or an App for a specific device can give a tailored and highly usable experience for the user. Doing so gives the best possible version for each device, but entails a lot of work catering to each device. Making changes or updates to a number of different information silos can be painstaking and each device upgrade may also entail additional work.

3. Responsive Web Design / HTML5 Apps
Both of these are buzzwords in their respective areas. Responsive Web Design or RWD entails having a single site, as per option 1 but with technologies that allow the resizing of the site to fit the device’s resolution. HTML5 is a way of designing an app that will work across devices on a common technology platform and again offers the appeal of designing once and appearing on different devices at an optimal user level.

As you would imagine, option 3 is generally seen as The Way Forward allowing a single point of information re-formatted for the specific device and offering an upgradeable, flexible approach to presenting information to the end user. Time taken to ‘measure’ each device and format accordingly means that future changes will only require you to ‘cut once’ .

There are two distinct forms of Search Engine Marketing that are normally defined as:

1. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Essentially, you pay the Search Engine every time someone clicks on your advert. These are displayed at the top or right of the main search listings

2. Organic Listings
These are the core of the search listings. You can not pay the Search Engine directly to be placed here.

As first glance the second option of Organic Listings may seem to appeal because each click is ‘free’, and indeed sometimes through good design and luck your site might appear at the top of these listings. But a growing part of these listings is dictated by Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) whereby an SEO specialist is paid to enhance the ranking of your website via a variety of methods.

Because the SEO process is constantly evolving and your competitors will be continuously attempting to approve their own listings, especially in competitive categories, the SEO is best done on a monthly basis and as such each click made via this method can have a cost comparable to PPC marketing.

If an SEO campaign is successfully built, it can prove more cost-effective in the long run as highly rated websites will continue to bring in visitors for a fixed cost irrespective of how many clicks it can get.

Where PPC advertising really wins is in the immediate effect it can have and the high degree of precision that it gives, both in terms of guaranteed results and highly specific targeting. Unlike SEO though, as soon as you stop paying for listings, your site will stop receiving those clicks.

Both types of Search Engine Marketing are effective, and often are at their most effective when used together. But just be aware that in competitive markets there is no such thing as ‘free’.

Business Analysis – Whenever you’re designing your website, you first move should be to explore your audience to gain an understanding of who they are. You want to cater to their needs and their expectations. This way you can decide on what approach is best for maximizing the lifetime value of your audience. It’s important that you gather the requirements of your clients and then develop yourself a requirement specification. Your requirement specifications can then be refined over a series of review processes until all the requirements have been identified and are understood.

Formulating A Web Strategy – It’s not enough to just understand the requirements. It could be that the most vital step in your web designing process is in formulating a good strategy for your site. Unfortunately a lot of web enterprises do not take the time or put in the effort to formulate a proper strategy for a customer’s business, and they create websites that are unable to support the business objectives of their clients. If you don’t strategise your business ideas in regard to the market trends, you’ll wind up having a site that is far less effective and might even lead to absolute disaster.

Content Development – This is like an art. Unlike the way some web design companies just manage information, you need to identify what your audience likes and then determine how much, the quality, the clarity, and the relevance needed to make your content attractive to them.

Verifying A Unified Solution – It’s important that you verify your site as being a unified solution for your business needs. Any websites being developed need to be tested and the tests should be made by experts who can validate these websites in areas like navigation, page layout, multimedia, functionality, browser compatibility, accessibility, and also W3C Compliance.

For eCommerce as well as web application, the focus should be on security testing and reliability in addition to all these things mentioned above concerning the parameters for ensuring a total unified solution.

Custom Web Design/Re-Design – Custom web design isn’t just a small step involving the creation of an attractive design. It’s not just a good enough design to meet the customer’s business needs. Anything that is only ‘good enough’ is simply ‘not enough’! Your website needs to be centred on the customer’s experience. It also needs to attract the right audience for generating a good ROI.

Standing Out From The Rest – It’s not enough to just have a website. You need to distinguish yourself from the pack. Can people find you online? It does no good to fulfil all your business objectives with your site if nobody can find you on Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Once you have the kind of website that stands out from the rest – you are on the top of the cliff and stand out from your competition!

You can be sure that there are numerous ways in which you can earn a lot of money by developing an internet marketing home business. The business can be started in numerous ways and you need a little bit of dedication and some skills in order to do this. However, the huge list of options can be extremely confusing and problematic for a beginner and only those who will know how to manage this problem will have chances to become successful!

When you read all those specialized articles and testimonials that tell you different things about how people became successful in this field, it is impossible not to end up asking yourself: what is it that I actually have to do? Well, you have to impose your own strategy and any strategy is great as long as it helps you keep the pace with the competition. Of course, there are some decisions that you have to make at the beginning, even before starting to design the web site and these decisions can represent the difference between a successful home business in internet marketing and a complete failure.

For example, you first have to do some research. There are hundreds of markets that deserve your attention, hundreds of services or items that are needed and actually extremely popular among internet users so you have to wisely choose the products or the services you will sell. No internet marketing business will have success if it sells products that people don’t need or don’t appreciate. Once you chose your field and set all the details regarding the products or the services that you will sell, you have to make sure that you create a very clear daily work schedule. In this way, you avoid losing time doing practically nothing useful for your business. Time is money and the faster you launch your web site and your business on the internet, the higher chances you have at becoming a successful internet marketer. The work schedule you set has to be a realistic one, so build yours considering this!

Never be too optimistic because this is not how things go in internet marketing. The internet marketing is a field where you have to be realistic and struggle to make the most out of any little detail. You have to work a lot for each traffic point, you have to direct your attention towards what competition does, what new offers and special prices appear and what type of new strategies appear. A successful internet marketer is the one who direct his or her attention towards every sector. You always have to be prepared for anything. This is the only secret of any successful internet marketer.

As long as you have this on your mind, you have a lot of chances at growing bigger and bigger in this business!