You want to start using online marketing to get more accounts through the internet. Where do you start? Do you redesign your website to make selling your products better? Or do you start advertizing on Google? Or do you start using a lot of e-mail marketing?

Small Biz Express experts provide you a high-level outline of the online marketing channels available to you. You may decide your online marketing mix depending on the nature of your business.

The online marketing channels widely available are:

Website
Your website is your most important online marketing tool in your toolkit. If you are like others, you have got your website designed and forgotten all about it. Your website needs to constantly evolve and be optimized. You have to invest time and money doing it.

From a pure sales perspective, we at Small Biz Express would advocate measuring your website design effectiveness regularly. How many unique visitors does your website get? How much time do they spend on your site? How much additional business does it generate? Does your website design do a good job of closing sales? At Small Biz Express, we recommend having a strong call to action as well as a robust measuring system as a part of our standard website design implementation. This should include a different phone number on your website so that you can track the number of calls and business that your website is generating as a part of your online marketing activity.

Almost all online marketing channels will drive prospects to your website. The web design has to ensure that that the sale gets closed here. So it is important that you focus on the website design.

Pay Per Click
Pay per click is amongst the most used online marketing programs. Search Engine marketing campaigns are typically the most used of pay per click programs. Search Engine Marketing works like this:  the customer searches online for a product or a service. You appear among the “sponsored links”. You pay only when a customer clicks on your link.

Search Marketing is powerful because of its ability to target. Your links can appear only when people of a certain region are searching or at certain times of the day. You can change the ad copy depending on what people are searching for to help you target your audience. And finally, you can create specific pages for these ads to help close sales better.

Does Search Marketing work? Business owners using search marketing accounted for Google’s $21.8Bn revenues in 2008. This is not the only search marketing program- Yahoo and MSN also offer search marketing programs as do other sites but Google’s program (called Ad-words) is the most powerful of the lot. If there is only one program that you want to focus on to drive results quickly, then search marketing is the way to go.