Here are 10 steps we recommend to get started on Internet marketing with PPC and SEO programs. We will address other internet marketing programs like social networking and blogging elsewhere.

1. First, get educated. It’s hard to realize just how much the internet has affected marketing and how powerful it can be. A educated conviction to start the process will help you thru the many obstacles you will face as you go thru the journey
2. Determine your goals.  Are you trying to grow massive traffic and sell ads? Grow awareness and create leads for a product?  These are two totally different goals and will require different tactics.
3. Assemble your consultant team. If you can afford it, having a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) consultant, an SEO (Search Engine Optmization) consultant and an experience writer or Product Marketing person is key.  In some cases, you can get consultants that can do two or three of these.
4. Work with your team to go over your company history, your revenue goals and your current method of selling your product or service. If you have a sales presentation, go thru  that. Then, have a discussion of what traffic and lead goals are reasonable based on your companies website, current page ranking, etc. This is often where companies fail – they set unrealistic goals.
5. Determine the top 25 keywords to start with, even if you are only going to use 10. For most companies, there are 100s of choices. Ask your consultant to do a traffic study on the choices. Punch in all the keywords into Google or other search engines manually and get a feel for the type of companies that advertise there, the top ranking topics, etc.  Finally, look up your competitors and see what keywords they are targeting. Based on all this information, pick the best 25 to start with.
6. Develop campaigns around your keywords, doing 5 at a time. Create messages that can be tried using A/B testing.  Study as many landing pages as you can to similar campaigns and pick the landing format you think is the most compelling, is about the right amount of words, has integrated sign-up fields and makes the offer really stand out.
7. Implement your PPC campaigns in a limited fashion until you get a feel for what messages work best, what landing pages have the lowest bounce rate and highest conversion rate, what formats regarding layout and field placement produce the highest conversion rates.
8. After trying several PPC campaigns, turn up the ones that yield results, turn off the ones with a bad ROI, and continue to design more around additional keywords.
9. Once PPC campaigns have run for a while, you will have a good feel for what keywords to develop longer-term SEO programs around to capture the same traffic and leads organically.
10. Have your SEO consultant agree with you on keywords and install analytics software on your site. Begin to optimize your current pages to attract traffic for these keywords. Once pages are optmized, put a backlink program in place, create additional pages and use complimentary push programs like email and webinars to push more traffic to the site.  Over time, SEO will pass up PPC programs and PPC can be used to target new words.