There are numerous aspects involved in developing an Internet marketing plan. From budget to the end goal, website marketing is a long-term process. It is also detailed process, which is the reason many site owners hire a marketing specialist to help them plan.

To start, you must think about the major goal of the marketing campaign. Do you want to increase customer loyalty, boost brand awareness or sell products? A correctly executed Internet marketing strategy can take an e-commerce business to new levels if all steps are geared toward reaching that final goal.

Your campaign will be limited by your marketing budget. Many website owners start with a small amount of money, gradually increasing the budget to the highest, yet still comfortable level. An Internet marketing budget can be unlimited, and you may never reach your entire customer base. Stick with what you can afford, and work within your budget’s confines.

Learn about the direct competitors in your niche by searching for your website’s keywords.

You will realise that some businesses are more competitive than others. And potential customers who are searching for services or products offered by your company will usually choose highly ranked websites. Therefore, any site listed on your site is a competitor. Thoroughly research their services and products, and learn their strengths and weaknesses. Make any necessary improvements to your website. Remember, a site is similar to a storefront. The more enticing the website’s design, the more traffic and sales the business will get.

Your services and products should not be carbon copies of your competitors, even if you must increase the quality of your items or include extras in your service packages. Finally, identify the customer base you want to target and advertise in places where they frequent. There are even some sites, particularly social networks, that will place business advertisements in front of certain audiences to which the ads are targeted. Getting people to your website is a very important skill. It’s not just about writing content and generating a buzz around it, although those are important skills too.

The work begins way before you start writing on your site, as you need to find the perfect niche – the subject of your website.  Research a market is about finding profitable subjects that are broad enough to write enough content about, yet narrow enough for you to become an authority on the topic. A great way to establish the popularity of a niche market is to use the Google AdWords keyword planner. Simply type in the name of the niche and you will see the number of searches performed each month, along with lots of related keywords.

you will have to sign into the tool, you will also see the average price you would expect to pay to advertise on the front page of Google for each term. This should give you a feel for how much money there is to be made in the niche you have chosen to research. There are a number of ways to find out how much competition you will face if you launch a site in a particular niche market. For a very quick and broad estimation, simply search for the niche name in speech marks in Google.

The higher the number of results returned, the more competition is out there. Of course, this doesn’t give you much insight into the quality of the competition, just the quantity. To get a more reliable indication of how tough a keyword will be to rank for in search results, there are free tools to download, popular ones include Market Samurai and Traffic Travis. These will analyse things like how many inbound links are pointing to sites already ranking for the niche terms.

This gives a far more accurate picture of competition but can take a while to fully research.

By doing your niche research properly, you will save time and effort. Focusing on the wrong markets will usually result in poor results, namely profit. When you find a niche market with plenty of search volume, good advertiser spends and relatively low competition, you have truly found your niche.