Three Steps to marketing your services on the web

Many people ask me about internet marketing and start talking about SEO.
This stands for search engine optimization which is about the web site appearing in the first page in google for some keywords.

The simple fact is that marketing for the web is similar to marketing anywhere else.

Trying to figure out my speech at the next Toastmaster's session in the Sydney CBD, if I were to break down the most important steps into a 5 to 7 minute speech.

There are three simple steps:
1) Attention
2) Interest
3) Response
So this makes the acronym AIR. This s a much simplified version of AIDA and some Internet Marketing Concepts.

So how do you make your web site relevant?
1) Get someone's attention! But how?
You have to know what the correct audience wants. Like the company I work for. We used to get 2,000 visitors per month and 2 phone calls a day until they de-googlised the web site. There's always someone who know better! A similar company was getting 40,000 visitors per month and only 2 calls a month.

Attention can be broken down into:
a) Knowing your audience
b) Finding out the pain points your service/product solves
c) Writing articles about that

I love the analogy of selling tyres. Most people don't care about their tyres unless rego or a long interstate trip is coming. Then they want to know where to get good tyres that aren't too expensive. So you need to target them by having articles about what to check when your rego is coming up and important things to check before your interstate road trip.

2) Make the article/web site interesting. Again this goes back to marketing basics. Make your article useful, not full of sales material.
You can again break this down into three points
a) Pick out the top three points and then write in simple conversational English as if you were talking to a teenager.
b) Provide feedback/reviews from customers
c) Use pictures and video if possible

3) Now you've hooked them, get a response.
a) Make sure simple things like your phone and email address are easy to get to.
b) Let them sign up for a newsletter or even just updates on services / products you offer.
c) Make it easy for them to ask you a question.

Back to the three principles: If you focus on Attention, Interest, and Response the web site will fall into place.
Write 1 to 3 articles, each discussing three points of interest, and sit back and let the phone ring and your email box to fill up.

Tom Bizannes dabbles in Internet Marketing for the challenge and has developed systems to quickly identify the steps you need to take to get to the front page in Google.