If you expect to achieve sustained growth for your Web business and you don’t have a plan in place to get you there, you might as well forget it. Growing a profitable Web Business is a strategic process that requires long range vision, careful planning, precise execution and patience. It’s vital that you know exactly what you want to accomplish and that you have a detailed blueprint to follow.

Of course you need to have a website that is optimized and tested to convert traffic, and then you need to devote time to developing and executing short-term and long-term promotional strategies. These strategies must stand on their own as well as work together to get you the best results.

Search engine marketing involves keeping your content fresh, using keywords that put you at the top of the first page and obtaining as many links to your site from other websites as possible.

Pleasing the Search Engines

1. Search engines love updated content. Pay attention to which sites show on the first page and you will notice that among the sites in keyword competition, it is the sites with the most updated content that win out. Either write your own articles and upload your own graphics and photos or outsource the job to freelancers.

A few weeks ago I wrote about building your website from the ground up. This article did not dive into great detail on any specific topics, but rather touched on the key points you will want to address. In this article I will place most of the focus on the promotíon aspect of this previous article. Image of bullhorn saying ‘Promoting Your New Website’

While at times new websites can experience organic search rankings in a matter of months, for the most part, it can take well over a year before you start to see any progress, and that is if you start promoting right away!

Bankaholic is a one-man WordPress blog run by 22-year-old Johns Wu, who just got the deal of a lifetime when he sold it to BankRate for $15 million, proving that blogging dreams really can come true.

I talked to Wu and got to know him a little better. We found out that he’s a young man who lives in an apartment, and lives on Subway and weekend drinking. I can relate to that. When I was 22 I had a similar lifestyle, except you could replace Subway with McDonald’s and $15 million with basically broke.

This is not exactly a “top 10″ líst, as all of the following things could easily be listed as the most important consideration. Individuals, small companies and big corporations all need to consider the same things when choosing a hosting package.

The overall “tip” here is that you need to get accurate information to make comparisons among hosts. Therefore, each individual tip is another, separate aspect of the hosting relationship that you need to investigate. You should take them all seriously.

Is the current tough market the right time to be slashing your advertising budget? Not if you want your business to survive the economic downturn and lay the groundwork to thrive when the economy improves! Tough times may actually provide us our best opportunity to reach out to our customers with little or no competition because so many of our competitors are doing just the opposite of that in an attempt to save money.

Twitter can be gamed too? Who would have thought? If there is a way to get promotion from a popular social site, you know that it will be taken advantage of. It just becomes a matter of competition at some point, perhaps even with people being paid to help with that promotion (right Diggers?).

Why would we think that Twitter is above this? Well, their announcement a month ago about cracking down on spam would be one indication, but honestly, who really thought that this type of behavior would be eliminated?

The CareerBuilder Model

Free press is one of the best ways to spread the word about your website, your product, and your brand. However, most people don’t know where to start. Fortunately, it’s really not as hard as you might think.

There are thousands of articles being published every single day on blogs, newspapers, and magazines. Bloggers, writers, and journalists have pages to fill and all of them are actively looking for interesting topics to write about.

With the economy in limbo what should search marketer’s focus on? WebProNews spoke to Milind Mody, CEO of eBrandz Inc, an SEO and SEM firm, about online marketing and advertising.

Mody said because of the economy “a search engine marketer might have to scale down branding campaigns in favor of tactics which yield great ’short as well as long term Return on Investment’.”

Specifically Mody said that local search is an important part of the overall mix. “Client reviews and customer ratings form an important aspect of local search SEO. These reviews also helps in branding and reputation management. So I would also highly recommend working with clients on getting their customer ratings and reviews on local search engines.”

Google is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Happy Birthday Google!

One way Google is celebrating this event is through funding 10 million dollars for the idea that can help the most people. An idea that could have the most impact on our world.

It’s an ingenious way to celebrate Google and what it stands for… a birthday gift to everyone.

You can find out more about Google Impact Project here: 10 to the 100

Google Has Already Impacted Many People

Like a lot of webmasters and marketers out there, I am very grateful to Google. Mainly because Google has been very good to me and has made my online livelihood possible with organic rankings, Adsense revenue, Adwords…