The Internet has become a haystack and the task to get noticed by your customers on Google is getting tougher each passing day. The search engines are populated with websites and web applications and even if yours’ is an excellent web project it won’t get noticed if you don’t start marketing it right from the beginning. You need to become the right needle in order to be noticed in this haystack! The conventional approach has been to wait till a web development project is completed and then focusing all the marketing efforts to publicize it on the Internet. Well, if you have been following this approach chances are that you have started noticing a reduction in business conversions. Any web development solution, be it a website or an application needs to be marketed right from the early stages of its development. It does not mean that you start bragging about the project even without giving a glimpse of it to your target audience. What needs to be made clear now is that a web project is never complete. You may have hired a great onsite/offshore web development company, you may have developed it, coded it and launched it on the web. But that’s hardly complete in a scenario where the Google guidelines are constantly changing. The key is to keep evolving your web solution according the Google guidelines if you wish to appear in the initial pages for relevant search requests made by your target audience. This means you need to fuel your website with fresh new content on a regular basis. So, it has to start right from the beginning i.e. developing an SEO-friendly website and backing it up with a strong Internet marketing strategy. Now mind you an Internet marketing strategy is an on-going process which requires in-depth understanding your business and your customers. You ought to get these two aspects right whether you have hired an offshore web development company, a local one or are doing it yourself. Once clear, you need to iterate the following steps:

• Conducting an online research to figure out how your website should be structured to make it relevant (the right needle) for the customers.
• Positioning your brand comes next. You need to decide what perception you want your target audience to have of your brand.
• The next step is to understand your current Internet presence.
• After understanding where you stand today, decide a goal of where you want to see yourself next month and take actions towards achieving it.
• Your brand needs to socialize with its target audience. For this, a deep understanding of how each social media channel can be utilized to engage with the customers will help in the long run.
• Take part in the relevant conversations taking place on the web.
• Build a community of your current customers and prospective clients who will in the future hire solutions from you.
• Embed your brand by making sure that each piece of content you write represents your brand.
• Generate leads
• Monitor and measure the efforts being put till now.
• Look for more new and effective ways to improve the results in the next cycle. This may include even small changes in the activities taken up while implementing your Internet marketing strategy.