I just read a great article, “Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips for 2008,” By Gillian Meier. It was nice to see some of the experimental marketing avenues suggested in writing by a specialist. And it’s a good reminder of how fast the industry is moving. Even the foremost experts acknowledge that there’s no secret formula to internet marketing and that you just need to dig in and find out what works for you. With that in mind, also know that these channels aren’t entirely untrodden and that successful and failed methods of using them are shared regularly—for your benefit.

The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:

1. Optimize your website’s content
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
4. Publicize your website through article marketing
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
6. Create a Company Blog
7. Experiment with video marketing
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
10. Create an effective email marketíng strategy

1. Optimize Your Website’s Content:

First and foremost, get your website content right. Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines. An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.

2. Create a Content Development Strategy for Your Website:

In addition to optimizing the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously grow your website’s content on an ongoing basis. All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimized for the search engines.

3. Invest in a Paid Search (Pay-Per-Click) Campaign:

When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website. Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.

4. Publicize Your Website Through Article Marketing:

Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicize your website and to grow the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content. To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Each article should be published on your website first and should include a bookmark button to encourage social bookmarking.

5. Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy:

Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place. Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy. Social Media has become an essential component of online marketíng and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation. One of the effects of the social media revolution is an exponential growth in the amount of content online.

6. Create a Company Blog:

In the past, corporates have focused marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless. This has changed significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality. More and more companies are starting to realize the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive. Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight.

7. Experiment With Video Marketing:

There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing.

8. Engage Your Audiences With Web Widget Marketing:

Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months. Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity to quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences.

Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online.

9. Discover the Benefits of Mobile Media Marketing:

Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognize the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones that can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that their websites are mobile-friendly. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.

10. Create an Effective Email Marketing Strategy:

Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.

To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain competitive, grow revenue and magnetise your customers!

So in part 1 of this series, we discussed the design phase of a website. An exploratory interview with the client has already been had and a graphical mock-up of the site has been refined and approved for development. This brings us to actually building the site.

As mentioned earlier, the push-button web creation function, provided by graphics applications like Photoshop, will not produce an optimal page structure or take into consideration forward-looking steps that will allow for a versatile and scalable website. During the design process, the designer/developer will have already mapped out the solutions for various site features and layout configurations. Given the different requirements surrounding these features, the site structure will be created to accommodate them.

Take a simple two column site layout for example. As the height of these two columns changes with varying amounts of content over time, how do the the columns behave? Does the overall site design depend on these two column expanding and contracting together or is it better suited to have them expand independently? Furthermore, do the pros of a table structure in this scenario outweigh the cons and what impact will this decision have on cross browser compatibility?

At this point, the considerations of structure have been made, the developer knows which language will be employed (according to their own expertise or perhaps simply based on the hosting server being used), and the site’s ongoing maintenance and accessibility has been factored in.

By this I mean, who is going to update the site and how? Even if the site is being built by an in-house developer who will maintain their own code, it’s simply not time and cost effective to maintain and grow a site from code view. Which bring us to building the site on a CMS (content management system). A CMS allows the site to grow gracefully, protecting sensitive code and maintaining the site design, while giving non-developers edit access to the site. There is a vast field of CMS’ out there to choose from and the one that’s right one for you will depend on your need. The demands of an online news agency, for example, will differ greatly from that of a local book club. Either way—big or small, high volume or low—a content management system is an absolute must.

Consider that we, professional web developers, use a CMS on everything internal that we build. Believe it not, I still see ads being placed by cost-conscious small business owners seeking low cost developers available to make frequent and ongoing edits to their site. That’s crazy! Done right, on the right platform and by the right developer, the upfront cost of building a site on a CMS is negligible compared to keeping a professional developer on payroll. In fact, when done right, the cost of building on a CMS can often reduce the cost of a project by allowing for quick replication of pages and page features as well as allowing the developer to set aside a majority of the content entry task for the client.

To be continued… We’ll continue our discussion of the development process in part 3 of this series. To be covered are site features, functions and integrated applications.

The web creation process begins verbally, then takes shape graphically, and won’t move into the code or programming phase until the final stage. This process isn’t well understood by those outside of web design. And why should it be? A great deal of “designers” don’t actually get it either.

Web sites aren’t conceptualized in a web development tool like Dreamweaver. The business needs of the client are discovered through an interview to identify wants, needs, the audience, the message, functionality, look and feel, and so on.

This discovery (scoping) information collected from the client is interpreted into a graphical mock-up in a graphics application like Photoshop. The mock-up is a non-functioning image of what the future site will look like—a flat image.

Once the graphical mock-up has been refined and polished, the image is then taken to code. Based on a number of considerations, including the programming languages to be used, web applications employed, search engine optimization techniques and more, the image is dissected and interpreted during the site building process.

It’s worth noting that modern graphics tools like Adobe Photoshop have a push-button website creation function, whereby anyone can use the tool to dump out the code and files required to post a web page. No doubt these features are quite amazing, but this method should not be confused with proper website development. Proper development takes into consideration usability, the target audience, ongoing site maintenance and scalability . . . not to mention the integration of different technologies that give life through functionality.