You have launched your online business and the internet is full of advice. However, there are four fundamental pillars of online business that can never be stressed enough.

Success of any business, especially internet based business, solely depends on certain basic principles. They can be listed as under:

1. Plan your marketing strategy before launching a product. Failing to plan is like planning to fail. Do some market research to find out suitable product/service that people are looking for. Some product demand may be local, some may be global. Does your product have a global market? Is your business poised to cater to the demand? For example customized tee shirts are in demand globally. However locally, people would like tee-shirts customized for their own teams. Plan your strategy. Do you have the resources to target all markets or will you start locally expanding to global markets later? Are the shipping costs feasible? Identify such groups of prospective customers by visiting different online forums. Get familiarized with the common keywords that people use. You may also visit your competitors’ website to find out the features of their products. Now you know the product or service in demand and you are ready to introduce a product better than your competitors’ products.

2. Get creative Your website is virtually your office or showroom. It should display ample sale-appeal to inspire your prospects to visit your site. It should describe the features of your product/service and how it can help them. Do the usual-emphasize on your credibility; add testimonials from your existing customers. You may add after-sales-service or some sort of guarantee to win your customers’ confidence. Your website should convey that your product or service is the best choice for your customers. But most important, it should involve visitors in a feedback-idea circle. Get your visitors involved like launching a 100th visitor coupon, a shipping discount to a certain area and so on. Your creative efforts will get written about and will result in publicity for you.

3. Be professional. Have a professionally designed website. It adds to credibility and this is the most important factor for building successful online businesses. Your website should be simple and customer-friendly. Internet users are impatient by nature and you have very little time to grab their attention. Get a professional and experienced web design company who can design and build your website based on latest SEO principles. Contents and keywords selection are main features that will attract your customers to visit your site.
         
4. Relevant Information. Don’t cheat on information. This is the one and only reason a person visits your website. Enrich his experience. Give him more than he imagined. Don’t promise something that you do not provide. Provide useful information on your website. Internet is a powerful media for getting information. Your website should furnish valuable information for your customers and other sites – by way of link back to your site. This will increase traffic to your website. It will improve your online business. If you get associated to different forums and social networking sites, you can share your views as an expert in your trade.       
                            
There is a lot more to internet business. This post on internet strategy for online businesses is worth a read.

Google does a googly and keeps changing its search parameters; SEO is no longer as predictable as before.

But, an online business is a survival business and to survive the fundamentals must be strong.

I was analyzing a few sites yesterday for the keyword “custom frames”. From the onset it was clear that the good old sites were at the top. But Surprise! Deeper analysis showed that the traffic to the ones at the lowly #5 and #7 were more than those at #2 and #3. How could this be possible? I did some research, could they be on #1 for dome other keywords?

No they were not.

So the logical deduction was that they were getting better referral traffic- either through some other site, WOM publicity or social media sites. What made others refer those sites?

The on-site analysis showed that the sites were well constructed and one could navigate them instinctively. This means that they were friendly. The first step in Great Customer Service! Their feedback section was easy. And it seemed that they were really incorporating those feedbacks.

There were no broken links, no ads popping up. No unnecessary pages and the checkout was easy.

To me it was a back to basics lesson. Search engine optimization has moved focus from customer experience to search engine experience. The only thing that this website did was to maintain their website very well. The rest followed.

Vlog is the abbreviation for video blogging that makes use of video as the primary content linked with video blog post. Vlogs go together with supporting images, text, along with added meta data for providing the context for videos. Vlogs are considered to be a great marketing tool that can be used for attracting traffic to the website.  

Like blogs, vlogs are also updated on a continuous basis that can include personal reflections and comments of the visitors. Vlogs can prove to be extremely effective and beneficial for the businesses as there are targeted audiences who prefer watching short video before they make any decision whether they want to visit the company’s site or not.  

Unlike blogs, vlogs can be used for conveying additional information in an interactive manner that can be entertaining rather then just reading the textual matter presented in blogs. There are researches conducted that have revealed that the targeted audiences tend to grasp and preserve the information offered in a better manner when both video and audio components are engaged that is made available with the vlogs.   

Video blogging can offer feelings, emotions and most importantly the visual aspect that cannot be provided by the blogs that are merely textual presentation of content. People like entertainment thus video blogging is considered to be an effective and efficient way that can make available for them adequate information and entertainment at the same time.

Blogs are written for providing information regarding a specific topic, video blogs work in similar manner when they are used for marketing the businesses. Videos can be produced in infomercials, interview styles, how to videos and TV show formats. With more creativity, vlogs can be used for conveying useful information. The more creativity used, more are the chances for the blogs to be passed to other people.

Vlogs offer numerous advantages with one of the major one being enhancing the blog post. The followers and other bloggers can easily associate the content because videos add enhanced value for reinforcing the writing.

Video blogging can also offer better search engine optimization. With the video embedded in the blog posts, the business can have an additional competitive benefit in search engine marketing.                    

With the effective search engine optimization, people can find the videos with ease even before they can find the blog. People search for the particular keywords and that can only obtained with the well optimized video titles. With this strategy, the businesses can help in dominating the beginning pages of search engines. Service professionals and network marketers can be highly benefited with video blogging as it is considered to be an excellent way for gaining an edge over the other competitors.    

Vlogs are more effective than simple blogs as the people tend to skip the textual mater in the blogs and they might end up missing the company’s essential selling points. With the short videos that take two to three minutes, the services and products that are offered by company can be highlighted along with their benefits that can let the visitor take a decision of visiting the website.   

Online markets revolve around search engines. Your competitor is optimizing their online business too. It seems like there is no longer a niche. The competition is intense and nerve racking.  So getting a target audience is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea.

The only way out of this competitive market is a killer campaign that will enhance your position in search engines. SEO services are not that important these days rather what holds importance is effective SEO techniques. Gone are the days when hiring a professional who could make your website search engine optimized, was enough. Today’s world calls for exclusive and successful SEO techniques.

Persuasive SEO content has been of prime importance in improving search engine results of a website. Search engines are fond of original and fresh content. By putting new content you ensure that search engines come to your website. If you add relevant and targeted keywords, you can get better search engine rankings. You would need a professional for assistance because these keywords should not be stuffed and should look irrelevant in the website. Apart from using apt keywords, other optimization techniques like text optimization, image optimization and flash optimization can be used. It is generally known as on site optimization techniques.

New trends in SEO include geographic optimization. It includes web pages that are apt for search engine rankings for users that look for services in a specific geographic region. Include your address in your website footer. Signup here at the mother of all search enginesà www.Google.com/LocalBusinessCenter

Social bookmaking is another trend that has been there for a while now. There are endless social media websites that can be helpful in improving link popularity. You will be able to get quality and focused traffic by doing so. Use of social bookmarking sites ensures that you are being read. So get your team into bookmarking your content!

Tweeting is a good SEO technique. You can capture your target market well by using twitter. Twitter provides valuable search engine tools that can help you find potential clients easily. Make use of keywords that represent your business and get a list of prospective consumers as your followers. You can start following them and there would be a lot following you too. Start posting information about your services and products once people start following you. This is a great way to create awareness about your brand while improving your search engine rankings. So get a Tweeter account today.
 
Here is a Case Study of how Twitter helped a small business owner:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/twitter-drives-traffic-sales-a.html

Here is something very interesting happened with the help of Twitter:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/traveltips/08/06/travel.social.media/index.html

Videos get organic traffic to one’s site too. Now, marketers look forward to universal traffic. Websites these days need to contain more than just text- more content and even videos. Podcasts let the marketers beat competition with flying colors. These podcasts are part of audios and videos and are present all over web. A website is required to fill up the niche and provide high quality and useful content in order to taste success. Using podcasting can be useful as means of delivering content while assisting webmaster to meet both these goals.

You can easily increase your authority by podcasting. You will be able to be the market leader. Podcasting lets you connect with the new audience. You will have a great opportunity to connect to a new type of audience. A lot of people are not interested in blogs and information on your website. By podcasting, you can connect with this set of people.

Wait no more, if you want to rule the search engines, do not just use SEO techniques rather make use of revised SEO techniques.