10 WAYS TO INTERNET MARKETING SUCCESS

The best internet marketing in Kenya strategies
have brought change in the advertising world,
and agencies are coming up with new ways of
branding their clients products online. There are
many misconceptions about online marketing
strategies, and it is because of this reason I
have decided to write this exclusive article.
Most people have been giving me different
views on running their ads on the internet
because they have been given the wrong
information, or simply they did have knowledge
of what is the best strategy to use online.
Are the internet marketers in Kenya misleading
clients? Or do they lack knowledge of the best
practices to use? Why do you run ads for a
customer if you are very green in the online
advertising world? Why place someone’s ad on a
website that has zero visitors simply because
it’s you friend or it was mentioned somewhere
as the best site? Whether a website has a good
design or got votes as the best anywhere online
that cannot be used to promote clients products
online. That’s stealing from clients, and that is
what is giving people wrong perception about
online advertising.
What Companies Need For Internet Marketing
1. Website and Blog
Companies have physical offices and locations;
this is where your clients get their goods/
services or where a delegation of duties occur.
When it comes to the Internet circles, you need
a registered office, where online consumers
would buy your goods/services, leave messages
and get feedback without any physical contact.
A website must have a registered domain like
www.mybusinesstricks.com; this is your
company’s name. You need a website hosting –
this is where your website domain resides – like
the physical location. Read what is a blog and
how to run a successful blog.
You need to hire web designers to develop the
website for you. Since your site would be static,
you will need a blog for your site - read this
article on what a blog entails, I also recommend
you read about taking your business online. In
the blog, it's where you will update anything
new about you company, provide product
reviews and so on.
2. Social Media Accounts
Before you embark on any major online
campaign or think of hiring an SEO (search
engine optimization) expert, you need to have
the major five social accounts up and running.
They include Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn
Company Page, Google Page and Local Listing
of Google, Twitter and Pinterest Account.
Having the above two categories in place, you
are ready for your internet marketing in Kenya,
either by yourself, a member of your staff, hiring
an internet market or considering MBT as your
marketing destination. Now, let’s look at the
right marketing strategies on the internet as per
their significance and importance.
Essential Internet Marketing in Kenya Strategies
to use to Promote Your Products
1. Content Marketing Is By Far The Best
First, before I analyze this strategy, am looking
at both the long term gains and short term gains
of either the advertising model. And yes,
content marketing is the Number one online tool
to use on the internet. And why exactly am I
saying that this is the number one method?
Using the Alexa Rank metrics – and I do not
want the noise that their metrics is not
consistent – I already know that – Google.com
ranks No. 1 in Kenya, YouTube No 3 and
Google.co.ke ranks No. 5. The three searches
engines, this means Kenyans consume more
content that you can imagine. In fact, when a
company advertises on TV or Print media,
Kenyans will use Google to search their reviews
and more information about the product.
And using the same metrics, all the leading
sites in Kenya, get most of their traffic from
Google and social media, a reason to continue
reading more about content marketing in this
article. The study has also shown that products
reviewed on blogs get more attention than
goods that have not featured on any website or
blog. There are several ways of content
marketing that you can use to promote your
products online – especially for long-term gains.
These methods include blog content, video
marketing, reviews, file sharing, and guest
blogging on authority blogs. Blog content is in
the form of articles, images, and infographics –
they say an image speaks 1,000 words, and I
say an infographic speaks a million words.
Remember when listing what you require for
internet advertising success? I said you needed
a blog and these articles you write or hire
someone to write you will publish on that blog.
For better performance on search engines such
as Google, I advise you write articles of over
800 words. Like this article you are reading, it is
over 2000 words and do not overuse your target
keywords – a keyword is a particular word you
want people to learn about when you publish
your content. After writing and publishing your
articles, interlink them using your target
keywords and share them on your social
networks. It might take some time for the
materials to be picked up by search engines but
once they start appearing in search results –
this is a long term investment you have made in
your business. You will also use the blog to
interact with your customers.
Let’s look at video marketing as part of your
content marketing strategy, as shown above,
YouTube is the third most visited website in
Kenya and world’s second largest search
engine. You create videos related to your niche
and upload them on YouTube, share with your
networks and customers to flock to your
business. There is another video sharing forum
called Vimeo – for Vimeo, you share videos
after paying and those videos appear on search
results better than the YouTube videos.
Reviews and Guest Blogging
Before you think of doing a review or guest
blogging – KINDLY – examine the statistics of
the website online. Use Alexa.com and
vampirestats.com to get an overview of how
the website ranks – do not allow yourself to be
a fool, get the right information. Some of these
statistics might be inaccurate, but since you are
reviewing all the sites using the same measure,
the statistics become accurate.
For instance, an excellent website in Kenya
should have its rank below 700, this means that
its getting ton of visitors every day. You can
have your products reviewed on a site and get a
link back to your original site, and this is the
same case for guest blogging. Here at
mybusinesstricks.com, our sponsored reviews
start at 5,000/= per review, and we have free
guest posts provided they meet all the
requirements on our website. To contribute to
our site, send us a message on our Facebook
page.
The last part of content marketing that we are
highlighting is the file sharing. There are several
online resources you can use to share your files
either in the PDF format or PowerPoint slides.
For PDF files, you can use Scribd.com and
Dropbox.com to share your business content
and use Slideshare.net to share your slides.
To achieve the success of content marketing,
you adhere to the following, share the right
content and do not misuse keywords. Share on
social media, leave behind Comments and reply
to comments, interlink your files, articles, do not
write questionable content, write for your
audience and not search engines.
2. Banner Advertising (Again, Remember to
Check The Websites Rankings)
There are two methods you can use to promote
your products in the Internet using the banner
advertising methods. You can decide to buy ad
space directly from websites giving this option,
and I highly recommend this option. Use third
party methods such as Google Adwords through
Google Adsense to serve your banner across
their network.
Banner advertising is an effective online
marketing strategy that you can use to increase
your business sales. We rank this as the second
best internet marketing in Kenya strategy to use
for your business.
3. Search Engine Marketing Strategies
A search engine is a website tool that helps you
discover content online through web pages –
refer to content marketing. Search engines
include Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Bing, Ask
among others. There are several search engine
marketing strategies that you should use and I
only recommend Search ads and Search engine
optimization. Each of the search engines,
provide its ads such that when someone
searches a particular product using a specific
keyword – your ad will appear beside the search
results. We have Google Adwords, Bing Ads,
Yahoo Ads, and if you are not familiar with this
options, you need to hire someone to help you
reach the right audience.
The second search engine marketing strategy to
use is the search engine marketing commonly
referred to as SEO (search engine optimization).
For SEO to work better for your company or
web business, you need to adhere to the
instructions give above on blog content. SEO
means optimizing your website pages, blog
content in a way that search engines will find it
when people look for information on the
internet. In this instance, you have no option but
to hire an expert in SEO. We have so many SEO
companies in Kenya and what you need is to
search for the in the Internet using your
preferred search engine.
SEO includes the on page optimization and the
off page optimization. The on page is a
technical part of SEO and requires an expert to
carry out the process for – but this is mainly
done by your website developers. It involves
having the right heading tags, a good source
cord, Sitemap creation and submission to
search engines. Deep linking, proper use of
anchor text – here is an example of an
appropriate use of the anchor text method for
deep linking – learn about the SEO services you
can provide in Kenya. The link connects an
article I wrote about “SEO services in Kenya,”
see the text of the link is different from the
article title.
The off page optimization includes link building
such as creating a link wheel, article prism, and
social bookmarking. Social sharing, guest
blogging, press distribution, article submission,
directory submission, blog commenting and
online reviews are other methods.
4. Social Media Marketing Strategies
I know most of you thought that I will place this
strategy as the number one method to use in
Kenya, but to your surprise, I rank this way No.
4. You can trust my analysis in the link I
provided above. I linked you to leading websites
in Kenya and most of them get traffic
organically from search engines that require the
application of the three methods above. I will
talk about two ways here Google Page/Local
Listing and Facebook, but remember to create a
Twitter profile for your company, ensure your
are listed on the LinkedIn network and get
verified on Pinterest.
a) Google Page and Local Listing
Google page is a must service for your
business, because of the power given to Local
listing on Google pages by the giant search
engine. And for your information, Google is here
to stay, and it is not likely to lose its market
share anytime soon – hence the reason to
comply with what it requires in ranking your
business website. You need to have a Gmail
account and create a Google Page from the
google plus of your profile. Once you create the
page – same way you do for Facebook, you
connect it to YouTube, Your website, and its
rankings improve on Google search results.
b) Facebook Marketing Strategies
Almost all the companies and brands in Kenya
are using Facebook to promote their products
online and reach over 3million Facebook users in
Kenya. Using Facebook to market your products
is very tricky; this is because Mark and his
team want to make more money from you. Now,
this is the funniest part of Mark’s team; you pay
to get likes. For you to share something and
been seen by your fans, you need to pay again,
does this make sense?
That’s why Facebook introduced the promote
posts option now calling it boost posts – just to
milk you more money. Just to give you some
statistics, when you share a link without content
to your likes of the page only 0.3% will see your
post. If you include some texts to the link 3%
will see the post and if your share like 150
words without any connection, around 16% of
your fans will see your post. For more people
who like your brand to see what you post, you
must boost that post even if you paid to the
get likes
5. Google Adwords Links
Using Google Adwords links is another way to
market your business online. For instance, in
Olx.co.ke, you can place your links to appear
after ads in a certain category. You can also
buy direct links from interested bloggers.
6. Email Marketing
Most Kenyans still use their emails to get
valuable information, and this is another reason
that makes Google and Yahoo top websites
because most people use Gmail and Yahoo mail
for online communication purposes
Among the many internet marketing in Kenya
strategies, for now, let me give you a chance to
conceptualize the above methods before we
analyze others ways for getting your business
online.