Marketing is about communicating your value proposition, not just to anyone who will listen, but more specifically to people who have a need that you fill. Using Internet tools and technologies for this task can allow you closer communication links with your target audience - segmenting your message to suit the audience in order to produce better results. This article introduces the top four ways in which Internet enabled forms of marketing should be used to spread your message.

1. Permission marketing with Email campaigns

Email marketing has become a mainstream, accepted method for communicating with your existing customer base. Additionally, many businesses collect email address through newsletter signup mechanisms. Gathering email addresses for your database doesn't need to be restricted to a newsletter sign-up though, customers who provide an email address and do not opt out should be added too.

If you operate an online shop, or any ecommerce business really, you have a specific set of actions you want visitors to do. It might be to sign up to a mailing list, complete a contact form to register a sales enquiry, request a call back, book a service or buy a product. To track visitor progress through this path, we use Google Analytics Goal setting and Goal Funnels.

Why track the path

Tracking that path isn't what is important here though. What we are interested in is tracking the drop off between the steps. Every extra step we have is a place where visitors drop out and don't become customers. The difference between the number of visitors that reach a step an dthe number that continue to the next is called a conversion rate. Knowing the conversion rates along your funnel allows you to assess the effectiveness of changes and allows you to compare your conversion rates at each point.

To maintain traffic and search engine rankings after moving a website, it is really useful to use the address rewriting capabilities available on most modern web servers. The ReWrite Module is often available on both Apache and IIS web servers to facilitate this. This, coupled with a 301 Permanent Redirect instruction allows you to redirect all of the old pages from a domain to the equivalent area on a new domain by matching the pattern, rather than listing thousands of individual redirect instructions.

The example instruction below will redirect www.myoldsite.com/anyexistingpages.htm to www.mynewsite.ie/anyexistingpages.htm in just four lines of code.

The code should be added to the .htaccess file which resides in the root of your website directory. Remember to always backup before attempting changes. Incorrect changes to a .htaccess file can render your website inaccessible.

There is a lot of good information around about optimising for search. There is a lot more long-winded and confusing information around. Here are 7 quick tips to enhance your search engine optimisation.

1Back linking. Back links are when some other website links to yours. Search engines see them as a positive vote for your website, assuming you don't link back. Ask clients and/or suppliers to link to you. If you can, ask them to make the anchor text one of your key phrases too.