1. Announcing the launch of the website

2. General promotion of the website on the internet

3. Specific promotion of the website at relevant locations for lead generation

4. Specifically targeting the consumer for business generation

5. Business

6. Regular maintenance

Announcing the launch:

This needs to be done to ensure that the website is indexed quickly and is available in search results. It also gives the ‘big business’ feel to the customers who are researching for due diligence. The easiest way of such announcement is via Press Releases. A good strategy for press releases is ‘three’, where a release is issued before the launch, one on the launch day, and the last a week after, to celebrate the ‘fabulous’ launch. It completes the full circle. There are multitudes of free and paid PR sites, which can release the News Article. It is suggested to use a mix of free and paid agencies for the release.

Expected Budget: $350

Frequency: one time

General Promotion of the website on the internet:

This includes Pay per Click campaigns on search engines. It is particularly good for an e-commerce website, to know what the target market is looking for and to analyze the direction of business. The traffic from particular keywords can give an idea of the future of business and the demand. It also helps in designing the strategies for ‘Featured Product’ on the website.

Expected Budget: range from $600 to $3000 per month

Frequency: continuous

It also includes Search Engine Optimization. I consider it to be a general promotion category item as the SEO cannot be specifically targeting your customers. It is a means for generating traffic and optimizing the website for user interaction. The target of any SEO activity should be to ensure that the user can find the website at relevant locations, and not to improve the search engine rankings. For example, one of the newest ways for a user to find the website is via the image search options. It is important the ‘all’ the images in the website have an identifiable name, and they include the right tags (alt, title etc).

Expected Budget: $1200

Frequency: one time, annual suggested

Specific Promotion of the website

It is important that the website is promoted at specific locations like trade directories or online trade magazines. It gives the relevant exposure to the business and is a good way to generate leads. There are various trade websites for the purpose and it helps to get a paid account at the best performing ones. If required, advertising inventories can also be purchased at these websites to stand out among the crowd.

Expected Budget: $800

Frequency: annual

Specifically targeting the consumer

There are various ways of targeting the end customer. The most frequently used is via newsletter and email. There are various email lists available for mass mailings, and if the website has a newsletter, the list can be used. Trade magazines also have a periodic newsletter which should be used for promoting the business. The website should be designed to create a mailing list, which can be used to send promotional material.

Expected budget: $300

Frequency: Monthly

Business

It includes maintaining the website’s ecommerce system, to ensure that the system will respond in time and also tracks the buyer behavior on the website. It helps in learning about the business opportunity in the future and also allows for removing the non-performing items from occupying precious screen space.

Regular Maintenance

This includes blog posts, twitter and Facebook pages, and other social media applications, to crowd-source visitors. It is beta testing changes and also gives an opportunity to business owner to get an opinion on new product releases. It is an ongoing process to keep the visitor engaged and to ensure repeat visits from users, who are looking for new content on the website. It helps in making a fan-following, which results in word of mouth publicity and business generation in long run.

The first rule for any business remains the same. There has to be an inherent value in the proposition and the visitor to the store/website should learn about it in the first 30 seconds. There has to be an activity for visitor engagement (like designing your room in this case), which makes the user come back and ask for more.

Having said that, it is true that Google is and will rule the Search Engine market for a long time to come. For a search query like “brief history of Jaipur”, Google has about half a million results while Bing only produced about sixty thousand. What’s funny about Bing is that the first result was from something completely irrelevant to the search term. It gave a website from a school that has a hostel named as Jaipur House! This query did not produce any result on Google Squared or Wolfram Alpha.

I thought of looking for something more intelligent. After all, Internet is supposed to be a place for research and I personally believe that if there is no learning from it, there is no use. I tried to look for the “distance of sun to moon”. I think it is different because there may be several websites about distance of sun from earth and moon from earth.

Google had the first result from Wikipedia, the entry for Moon. It didn’t give any information about the distance but the third result was from Wiki answers and it was the one I was looking for. Of course this could be better, like Bing. The first result was from Wiki answers and the excerpt was on target. What’s more, I could also place my mouse over the result and see the preview of the website, getting more information about my query.

Sadly, Google Squared didn’t bring anything out, which made me realize that it is not meant for such queries. The best answer was from Wolfram Alpha, the clear winner here! It told me that the Sun was 1.016 AU away from the moon. An AU is an Astronomical Unit and another query told me the meaning of 1.016 AU in KMs, along with the values in Miles, Meters, Minutes (travel at the speed of light), and comparison of the distance with other similar entities.

This is what I call intelligent search! I am looking forward to a great Search Engine, which will help people find information that they can use. Black Hat and White Hat wearers have already spammed Google database and the websites looks more like link directories. Information is being replaced by Keywords and content by strategy!

Any blog, which has a good Google Page Rank, suffers from trackback and comment spam. There are various marketers who find this as the easiest way of improving their link popularity and getting free traffic. The best way to get rid of this spam is to activate the Akismet plug-in, which is included by default with the WordPress installation. From the Akismet website:

Akismet is a contraction of Automattic Kismet. Our favorite definition of kismet is "Kismet (principle), the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense."

Use of Akismet requires a key, which can be obtained by registering for an account with WordPress.com. The plug-in is good to go after its activated, however advanced users may change settings to please their geek nerves.

The only other thing required now, before actually starting to write to the blog, is to ensure that the Search Engines can find the blog easily and they can also index it well. WordPress has 2 popular plug-ins, All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps Generator. These two plug-ins also work out-of-the-box. There are no changes required, however options are available if you want to customize them.

With this done, the blog is ready for posts. I guess there are a few more customizations and optimizations that are possible and we can discuss them in the posts to come. Do write in if you have any suggestions or best practices.