My Top 10 Website and Internet Marketing Tips for Gift Basket Businesses

If you own a gift basket business, want to start one or add one to an existing related business, consider taking your products and gift basket business online. You'll need to plan ahead and know how you're going to market it first. Anyone can set up a website but no one will know it's there until you drive traffic to it. So you'll need to learn a few Internet marketing tips, tricks and techniques. I've outlined some of my most important gift basket business tips in the following list:

1. Learn copywriting tricks to help you write your website pages. Write like you talk, use contractions, short sentences, and learn the rules for title capitalization. Articles (like ‘a', ‘an', etc.) and connector words are not capitalized unless they're the first word in a sentence. Prepositions are not capitalized if they have four letters or less. Check on the Internet and keep a stylebook or grammar book handy.

2. Choose the easiest website builder available. Text (WYSIWYG -‘what you see is what you get') editor or html editor? A text editor for website building is best. You don't need to use an html editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver to put up a great website! And many report they're difficult to use. You want a website builder with an easy interface. Plan to be your own Webmaster rather than farming out work to Webmasters or programmers. Expenses can add up fast and you may need to make changes several times a week. Initially it'll take some time and devotion to learn how to do it, but you'll have that knowledge forever. You can build even more websites and get paid for consulting too.

3. Choose a good Web host. Make sure the host offers unlimited amounts of email addresses and lots of bandwidth or data transfer. Call or email support to see how fast they respond. If your website ever goes down in a high traffic period you'll want to be able to get in touch with them fast. There are hundreds of Web hosts. Read what several Web host reviewers report before you decide. They're usually pitching an affiliate Web host or two and may not be objective. Look for complaints on the search engines about specific hosts you're researching. Sign up for monthly service rather than annual service so you can evaluate further if necessary.

4. Choose the right primary and secondary keywords for your site. Do your research BEFORE you publish. The competition will be high for common words and you'll likely not end up on the first page. There are several free keyword tools available. In the search engines type in gift basket-related words in quotes to see what the competition is using. How many pages come up? How many visitors for that keyword or keyword phrase? Right click on ‘view source' to see the keywords in html. Look for keywords in the website and ad headlines and descriptions.

5. Write your marketing plan BEFORE you start buying any equipment or software, or building your website. You'll need to know HOW you're going to market your site BEFORE you start building it. Will you be adding affiliates to your site? Google AdSense? Will you offer a newsletter? Will you be selling other physical products besides your gift baskets? Or maybe you only want a site to market a digital product like an ebook about gift baskets? Plan to submit gift basket-related articles using an article distribution service and press releases using press distribution software. You'll get sought-after inbound links through the reprinting of your articles and press releases. Also sign up for a good link service.

6. Choose the right affiliates if you plan to include affiliate marketing. Make sure the affiliates fit with your gift basket theme. Don't add totally unrelated banners.

7. Learn how to use eBay in your marketing plan for an extra boost in sales and exposure. Use the "About Me" page to hype your website.

8. Learn html code -- optional but I highly recommend it. Use a simple free tutorial offered on the Internet. You don't have to write code unless you want to. It's not necessary with the text editors out there that do the work for you. You could spend hours writing html. Why do that? You can learn the basics in a day or so. You don't have to learn the advanced code. Even if you only take two or three lessons you'll be way ahead of the game.

9. Learn how to write a free newsletter to boost your online presence. Take dozens of other free newsletters in various fields of interest and study style and techniques. Offer your free newsletter in the beginning when you first publish your site to start collecting subscribers. Don't wait until later.

10. Choose an autoresponder service to handle your newsletter database, send out newsletter inquiry responses and free reports you're offering. This is a must if you plan to have a newsletter. It's the best way to handle your subscribers, send out confirmations, and get your newsletter out, etc. It usually costs about $20 per month.

Make sure to back-up everything. Back up your website files daily, if you make any changes. I know this is basic. Make copies of your site to CDs often. Put website copies on another computer hard drive. Network two computers if possible. Anything can happen to your hard drive. A surge, lightning, age, drive defect, etc., can damage your hard drive in an instant.

These are just a few of the gift basket business tips you can use to get your online gift basket business up and running. It takes research and hard work but it'll be well worth the effort in an increased customer base and a big boost in income.

When you do get your gift basket website up, if you plan it right, it can mean lifetime income. With weekly maintenance— adding rich content, more pages, affiliates, products and specialty baskets, and daily good marketing, you'll get a big boost in your gift basket business income. Millions go online typing in gift basket-related inquiries daily. I hope you find these gift basket business tips useful. Happy Internet marketing!