As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. While the health and profitability of your online marketing campaigns is important to you, chances are that you’re spending more time making sales or otherwise helping your customers. Unless you have an outsourced marketing team or staff in-house to keep that flow of traffic coming, you need to focus at least some of your time on marketing. Today we’re going to look at a few ways you can make the most of that time, to cover the bases in your marketing strategy.

Google is big. If you’re not focusing any time on keeping up with the big G, then you need to spend at least a little time each month learning from them. Matt Cutts has done an outstanding job of building out Google’s video repository with tips and tricks on how to achieve rankings in Google on the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube. What you’ll find here is the cleanest of clean white hat techniques on building your search engine rankings. Subscribe to this channel and listen in every now and then to keep up to speed on changes with Google.

Content is big. The Internet is not stagnant media – it’s always changing and so too should your website if you want to improve your search engine traffic. Always be updating and creating new content for your site. You don’t need to go full bore with this to have some positive effects on both your search engine rankings and your site’s stickiness. Just commit to regularly posting new content on your site and on your social media profiles. This could be as simple as a blog post each week. By the end of the year, you’ll have more than 50 unique pieces of content for your site. I particularly like video, because its very easy to create new content quickly with video. Remember as well that YouTube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine, behind Google, so getting quality content up on YouTube could help drive new interest in your business and your website.

Creating this new and original content can do some pretty cool things for your business. For starters, you’re establishing yourself as an authority in your niche or industry. If the content is good and original, you’re also increasing the chances that other websites will link to your site. This is where the magic really happens. Getting other relevant websites linking to you not only brings some direct traffic, but also can improve your search engine rankings! Whats more, you’re taking your original content and sharing it on your social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn, whatever social media outlet(s) you’re focused on. So within just a little time, you’ve given your visitors new content, built more relevant links to your website, established yourself as an authority and given your loyal followers yet another reason to come back to your site, aren’t you a stud?!

These are the basics. If you can spare more time, there are many other great ways to supercharge your online marketing efforts, like setting up an affiliate program, PPC campaign or buying media. These tactics do require time and attention though, so make sure you have the basics covered before diving in.

Author: Josh Ewin
Director of Marketing; FortressITX, DedicatedNow and SolarVPS

Some great information in there. I disagree with putting the blinders on and JUST focusing on Google, however. Granted their market share is dominant, doors should not be closed to other lead generators.

Social media is booming, and booming more every day. Stake flags at Facebook, Twitter, and other relevant networking sites. Make local listings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Spread your marketing wider to create more entry points to your site. Spend more time with Google, but don't forget about others who can increase your profits too!

Thanks for your insight!

Big G has the control over most part of the search engines' share so first one must focus on it alone. After getting top rankings there, one can work on the small ones later.

I like your question because it acknowledges the fact that website marketing is not simple and straightforward. There are "basics" as well as the "advanced" concepts. To answer your question, I think what's really important is to know how to manage your content and to get your updates to people as quickly and regularly as possible. It's a balance.

Nice post , I agree that there are a lot of other basics to be covered as well :) , and for the content , I think we can dramatically increase our visibility when we write articles in our area of expertise and distribute them to editors of other sites as free content for their e-mail newsletters or their websites :)