Building a New Site …Where Do I Start?
It's easy to attack too much at once when you are launching a new site. You can get lost in the details of one project and forget the basics of site structure, content your visitors will love and making sure they know how to buy from you. Click To TweetThe chicken is the site structure and your plan to appear on the search engines. The eggs are the digital marketing campaigns you will plan and execute against your site , blog and social events to bring in qualified traffic that leads to  great conversations and sales.

Build a Site and Go is No Longer Enough 
You need a general wire frame or skeleton of what your site will look like when it is done. Better yet, a plan for all of your web presence including social media properties and the campaigns planned against each. Old school fake SEO and the days of having only your web site to draw attention online, are gone. You have to have an integrated approach between your site and social media and a creative and messaging strategy that speaks with relevance to your audiences on each. Do research on your audience’s search engine activity and create a site and social media presence with focus around keywords that reflect how your audience talks about your business. (avoid advertising with the words you use, they won’t respond) Start with a basic site that contains the basics of What We Do, Who We Are and How to Contact Us, plus a generously populated blog that is relevant to the types of problems your audience(s) are trying to solve.

Drive Qualified Traffic
Next you want to figure out what will drive the most qualified traffic to your site and your social media presence. Is it contests? Email marketing? Social Games? Traditional marketing like post cards or letters? You will need to test some of all of these ideas to figure out where your audience’s sweet spot is – and then grow and optimize those efforts.

Influencers
You also need to identify the top 10 on and off line influencers in your industry and begin to court them. You only get one chance to make a great first impression, so be strategic and careful in approaching influencers. You don’t want to irritate the wrong guy and lose a huge opportunity with a key audience. Email, phone calls, and even gifts work, but you and they need to publicize it if you motivated influencers with cash or gifts.

A Step By Step Guide for Launching a New Site might look like this:

1. Find and meet with a mentor who has just launched an online business.
2. Identify, research and understand your audience personas
3. Research and identify your keyword strategy
4. Create a site wire frame illustration that reflects the content you will need and the paths your customers will need to contact and buy from  you
5. Create a content plan. What content is needed on each page? How will the blog be structured and what articles do we need ready to go on launch day? Content=words, images, video, live streaming, graphics.
6. Create a traditional and online PR plan. Use a template to create a business launch annouce press release and use PRWeb or another tool to distribute it online.
7. Create an off line and online marketing plan
8. Decide what tools or functionality your site needs to be effective (calculators, videos, reviews, etc.)
9. Plan and initiate test marketing campaigns against social media and your web site.
10. Plan your launch date and go live!

Step by Step Guides
If you need step by step guides as to how to identify and activate influencers and launch different types of digital and traditional marketing, stay tuned in the coming weeks I will be publishing those guides as part of this newsletter.