Mar 9, 2010 - Comments: 0

How to Be An Overnight Success Online (In 30 to 90 Days)

Posted by Heidi Strom Moon under Interactive Marketing , Social Media , Web Strategy
Success Whenever we work with start-ups as online marketing clients, they often want to know one thing: how soon will this start working?

It’s completely understandable. They’ve just invested considerable time and money in creating their new product or business. They want to know how quickly they can start earning a return on that investment.

But just as a new brick-and-mortar shop needs to take steps to build its customer base, an online business also needs to put in some up-front effort in its online marketing to create interest and drive traffic, and ultimately sales.

Although some of these steps yield more immediate response, others—search engine optimization (SEO) in particular—simply don’t happen overnight. A more realistic timeframe is 30 to 90 days.

So here’s our recipe, and a sample timeline, for generating success in 90 days or less.

Month 1: It’s All About the SEO

Although Google and the other engines index sites more rapidly than ever before, search engine optimization still generally takes the longest time to yield results, so this is where you need to start. If you didn’t already do your keyword research when you wrote your site content, now’s your chance. Make sure your pages are optimized, from keywords on the page to the title tags hidden in the HTML.

Oh, and while you’re starting your SEO efforts, also make sure you have web analytics of some kind installed on your site. Google Analytics is great for start-ups; not only is it powerful, but you’ll love the price (free!). No matter what package you use, make sure your analytics code is added to your shopping cart process so you can track sales and conversions.

Next, begin your inbound link-building campaign. Reach out to high quality, relevant blogs in your space and ask for links, or find blog posts to comment on with a link back to your site. Inbound links from quality sites are a significant factor in improving your search engine ranking.

Finally, if blogging is part of your online marketing strategy, start generating your content now. Incorporate your keywords here, too.

Month 2: The Other Optimization

You’ve optimized your site for search. Now optimize it for conversions. You should have some amount of traffic visiting you, and you’ve now got 30 days worth of site analytics.

Look for pages that need improvement; for example, ones with high bounce rates, indicating arriving visitors didn’t see anything they were looking for and immediately left. You can’t sell to a customer who runs away.

Pay particular attention to what’s happening in your purchase path.

  • Are customers abandoning their carts? 
  • Where? At what rate?
  • What percentage are converting? 
If your conversion rate is low, you need to fix this before you do anything to drive more traffic. One way to identify purchase path issues is to do usability testing.

Meanwhile, you can start to ramp up your online traffic driving-efforts, such as guest posting for bloggers in your industry space, starting a Twitter feed or joining relevant groups on LinkedIn.

Month 3: Start Spreading the News

Your site’s starting to rank in the search engines now and you’re keeping an eye on your conversion rate. Now’s the time to really start driving traffic.

  • Increase the activities you started in Month 2.
  • Keep up your blogging.
  • Look for opportunities to comment on other blogs or guest post for them by monitoring relevant keywords using a tracking tool like Google Alerts.

Does your product or business have a newsworthy angle? Write an article about it and publish an online news release through a service like PRWeb or PR Newswire. Add yourself as a subject matter expert to Help a Reporter Out.

Finally, consider augmenting your efforts with paid marketing, like Google AdWords or Facebook ads. Because you know your profit per item or value per lead, and your overall conversion rate, you should be able to calculate your ROI on advertising. Try a small campaign first to test effectiveness; you can always expand it if it works.

What’s Your Recipe?

These are some of the online marketing tactics we employ at CDG Interactive to help our clients achieve success. (Contact us to find out how we can help.)

Now it’s your turn. If you’re a start-up that’s found success, or a marketer who’s helped a business launch online, leave a comment and tell us:

  • What timeline do you follow?
  • What tactics have worked best for you?
  • How quickly have you achieved results?

[Photo credit: Bruce Berrien, Flickr Creative Commons]

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