The five biggest opportunties in online marketing

Don’t take the online opportunity (so that I can). FRED SCHEBESTA

By Fred Schebesta

If you are still on the fence as to whether online marketing is for your business or not, I urge you NOT to take up the opportunity. I appreciate it’s quite risky and it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry with this online thing.

I would prefer you leave the opportunities to the affiliate marketers who snap up the good domain names and own the search engines in your market. This way the opportunities can go to other people and it will leave the little guys with a better chance to make some big money.

You see, affiliate marketers prey on markets that aren’t dominated to make money. Leave them to take up the most fertile online real estate to farm your budgets and setup some passive income. They need to put their kids through school as well.

The top five biggest opportunities you should consider in online marketing today

Seriously, there are some open opportunities in online marketing I would be researching immediately with an agency today if I was controlling the online marketing budget. Here are the five most important ones that are going to effect you the most.

1. Optimisation

Website optimisation has got to be your next step. If you only have one homepage then it’s time to get into 2008 and try some split testing.

How to optimise your website?

1. Setup a second version of your landing pages/homepage.
2. Run a split test between the two and see which one converts better.
3. Kill the loser and try another version against the winner.

Then split testing your landing pages.

2. Natural search

There are always changes and additions to your website that can improve your rankings. If you rank number one for your main keyword, what are you doing about all the other words people search for? Three key tests:

1. Do a ranking comparison for the top 10 keywords in your market between you and your competitors.
2. Check out what is the most popular word people search for, as it may have changed.
3. Change your homepage content; it’s probably old and tired and a refresh always drives up traffic.

3. Email your customers/prospects a video

Be different; send a video to them as opposed to text. What is visually interesting in your niche? What can be explained better in person and will usually translate into a good video. Review my advanced traffic secrets for advice on producing this video to get traffic.

4. Play on the fringes of social networks

Social network marketing is tough if you don’t commit the time to participate in the community and become an active contributing member. If you can’t invest that kind of time, try and service them in another way:

• Provide the place for them to talk.
• Contra services to the community.
• Produce a cheat sheet for them to use.
• Build a special calculator.
• Put on an event/seminar for them to get together.
• Provide a free piece of software.

5. Set off some fireworks

I have a nephew and he has learnt some brilliant lessons in getting people’s attention early in his life; he uses two key tactics.

1. He will call out your name. Anytime someone says your name you listen. It’s a money word.
2. He will pull out the double whammy. He starts by calling out your name to get your attention and if that didn’t quite work he says “I love you, Fred”. He drops the big three words in front of your name! That pulls me in everytime.

Fireworks are a great way to get people’s attention. It’s even better when you catch a free show – think of it like someone setting up a fireworks show and you weren’t supposed to be the intended audience. Notice whenever that happens people ask one question: “Why did they set those off?” This is a big attention grabber.

Just like my nephew and the free fireworks, how can you get some attention in your niche?

Fred Schebesta’s company Freestyle Media is an established innovative online marketing agency specialising in building search engine friendly corporate websites and running online marketing campaigns.

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