Websites

To do marketing online I assume you already have a website. If not, go to hostgator.com and use the coupon code you see to the right to get 25% off on your hosting. Domains are cheaper from namecheap.com.For now I’ll assume you already have a website so let’s get into the kinds of websites you might want to do marketing for.

1. E-Commerce: e-commerce website are websites that display the goods and are ready to take orders and ship to the customers or prepare for them to pick up. For digital goods they are ready to take orders and provide a download link to the purchased items.

Such websites are easy to market for because they target customers who are already in the buying mode. So once they reach the websites they might as well place the order. Some things might help the customers place the order such as reviews and comparisons.

2. Affiliate websites: those are built by affiliates to mediate a sale for one or more merchants that pay them per sale or lead. The affiliate websites could be review sites, blogs (both real and fake), and lead capture pages that follow up with emails. The main purpose of the website is to generate the sale, just like the e-commerce, except that affiliate sites don’t collect money, they just prepare the customer for the purchase then they send them to the sales page (an e-commerce site) to place their orders there.

3. Information websites: such as wikipedia.org and drugs.com, they provide information about a certain subject or a variety of subjects. Such sites are either built by the website owners or by content built by the users. In both cases, the site owner is the one responsible for marketing for the website. All governmental and education sites are both information and e-commerce at the same time.

4. Web 2.0 sites: and those are interactive sites built on content provided by the users. Wikipedia.com falls into this category as well, and other examples are squidoo.com, hubpages.com, ezinearticles.com and almost all article directories. Blogs are also web 2.0 sites but I categorize them in a separate category because of the personal nature.

5. Blogs: each blog is supposed to be the update portal for a person or a company that uses web 2.0 to keep in contact with the audience. Celebrity blogs are more about their news and latest work, while those of companies are more about new products, policies, or promotions. Blogs also can be used to serve a politic or religious group, such as the bloggers who lead the revolution in Egypt using their blogs and social networks.

6. Social networks: like facebook and twitter, and those are mainly personal in nature and they can also serve common causes, again such as the Egyptian revolution. This kind of website is totally built with the content provided by the users. The content might go viral, from one visitor to his/her friends then their friends and so on, if the content has some criteria that will be discussed elsewhere on this website.Video sites like youtube.com are also considered social networks but I prefer to put them in a separate group due to the visual nature.

7.  Video sites: such as youtube.com and dailymotion.com. These websites are specialized in sharing videos by the users who upload them on the servers of the site. The visitors of the video sites are interested mainly in entertainment and sometimes news, but rarely in education or information. Still those sites serve ideally for education purposes.

8. Membership sites: such as webmail (yahoo email for instance) and bank accounts, they provide a service that users will need on regular basis. Such membership sites could be paid or free, and they both have members only area where they can only access using user names and passwords.

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