Creating the perfect online marketing strategy

So there have been previous post's, what's the best way to advertise, how to promote your site quickly etc, but I wonder if we can come up with a fairly standard marketing blueprint that would fit the majority of new businesses?

Here's the scenario:
You've started a new online business selling widgets. You have set yourself a tight budget, but can afford to allocate £300 a month for all your marketing and advertising needs.

So what's the best strategy month on month to get your new digital empire off the ground that will give you the quickest return as well as longevity and growth?

Here's my 5 pence worth..

1. I'd allocate £200 a month on PPC and start learning the PPC ropes, building up some history and stats and hopefully start generating sales quickly to iron out any teething problems in the sales flow process.

2. £100 a month on Paid Directories/article submission/other online advertising and start building up oneway links to your widget website.

3. Sign up with as many freebie directories as I could. May not be SEO friendly links, but any advertising is good advertising, and most of these will sit happily away in the background for you.

4. Sign up with business forums and any industry related forums, and get myself known as the widget expert. Allocate an hour a day (night) to build up your social networking presence.

5. Start building up other aspects of my Social Networking presence, ie twitter, Facebook Fanpage, Linked In etc.

6. Sign up with Google alerts and monitor any positive or negative comments about my widgets, and keep control of your online reputation.


Anyone else have any thoughts? Do you agree, or would you take a different approach?

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cheers Steve
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Steve

Option 2) - so equates to £1200 a year, sounds like a lot to me.

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£100 on link building is peanuts really but for a start up it's a start.

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to be honest I think it is too difficult to do a blueprint that would suit the majority of new businesses as it depends on a number of factors.

To name a few:
1- Type of business and competition
2- Aims of the website (B2C, B2B, C2C, e-commerce, services, info etc etc)
3- Calibre of the website (as in how engaging, layout, overall message)
4- Target market and target location (location as in local, national, international)

However, I do agree that the points mention are a good starting point

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I don't think so if you're looking for to get some quality links and promotion to give your indexing and traffic a bumpstart.

That's a good point, we've all seen (or even been guilty of) very poorly designed sites or home grown amateur efforts that stand little chance of converting, so any marketing spend really is wasted.

I'd assumed our new widget outfit is a local/national business, but maybe step one of your marketing campaign is to test the water with website reviews, feedback, market research, then with the results, tweak, split test, get more feedback, then when happy, start putting your hand in your pocket.

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cheers Steve
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This, in my opinion, is the most important point of all!

You can market any website but the ROI recieved, will very much depend how good the "sales tool" is.

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I would love to be able to have that sort of money to throw into advertising and marketing, the sad reality of it is that i dont, I am slowly building a mailing list that has been helping, I dont want want to over use it and alienate customers .How often can you send out a mailer with out it becoming too much ? i would be interested to find out how others feel about this , i am sending out a letter about once a month at the moment

thanks Sebastian

Are you varying your message? If you aren't then I would say once a month is a little too much.

To get the best out of marketing you really need to have a marketing mix. It doesn't need to cost a fortune if you plan it correctly.

Remember that different people respond to different marketing methods and different call to actions. By only utilising 1 or 2 marketing methods or medias, you could be alienating prospects because they haven't received your message in their preferred way

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