in General

Promoting your website

Once youve built your website, you need to promote it and draw leads, customers and revenue.

For many businesses this means search engine marketing, optimisation and placement however this is not the only way of promoting a website, or attracting new customers (and leads).

Although such paid services as Google AdWords, or hiring expert SEO experts can be beneficial and bring you fast leads, it might be very expensive or way out of your budget.

So, how else can you promote your website?

  • Signature marketing – Placing a link to your website as a signature on every forum, outgoing email or anywhere where you think people will see it remember not to spam your way to success
  • Link Optimisation perhaps you can improve your ratings by reciprocal linking strategies link with other websites who, in return, link to your website. For blog sites, this is done via the pinging and trackback functions.
  • Learn Basic Search Engine Optimisation – The basics of e-Marketing via SEO can be picked up pretty fast you dont need to know everything; just simple quick fixes will do for now after a while you will learn what works, and what doesnt work. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, you may need to hire your web team to do this, outsource it to expert SEOs or just rely on the search engines to pick you up.
  • Establish credibility, reliability and peace of mind – Many online businesses fail because they either do not allow their customers to contact them, or they do not fully trust them. To establish credibility, start offering testimonials, case-studies, reports and white-papers. To establish reliability, start putting ways and methods of contacting you and offer quick advice and support. To establish peace of mind, offer a forum, good customer support and online payment security.
  • Customer retention strategies – Once youve got the lead, you need to turn this lead into an actual customer then, hopefully turning them into loyal ones. If you dont have content, products or services with tangible, quantifiable benefits why should anybody buy anything from you? – You can use articles, XML/RSS feeds, electronic newsletters, online Press Releases, forums, message boards, online entertainment (broadband entertainment), or offer competitions/prizes to help youre your leads into customers and help keep your customers coming back for more
  • Traditional Marketing – This is the most overlooked part of any eMarketing campaign. Traditional marketing strategies such as getting on the radio, promoting your website via newspaper Press Releases (PR), printing T-Shirts, getting a umbrella branded in your own colours, marketing on your car (branded in your own colours), leaflet distribution, direct mail and other guerrilla marketing techniques. Traditional marketing gives your website tangibility.
  • Measure the results – If you make a telephone, website or email sale try to find out where your customers came from did they get referred by their copy of the yellow pages?, a friend?, another website?, or by a search engine? Measure the amount of visitors you get in a week/month and then compare it with last weeks/months how did you perform? How and where can you improve?

There’s lot of other ways too – this is just a brief introduction to how you can use guerilla marketing to help attract customers, I’m sure you can think of ideas that could be used for your website that would compliment this list.

Google Adwords is a fantastic way of generating fast leads to your website, but it can be incredibility expensive. Unless you can turn those leads into actual customers you will end up wasting a lot of money, regardless of how many visitors you get.

As with any marketing campaign, cost is a big factor. Always get a measurement of the financial implications of your e-Marketing actions before you start ask what you want to achieve, get your web team involved (but make sure they get paid on results, not on their services).

Also remember that e-Marketing is not a one-off, if youve attracted 500 visitors this month but next month you might attract 250 visitors next month so you need to find out why, and how to improve the situation for next month.

Successful e-Marketing comes from treading the water (ie: never spending thousands on just one campaign), measuring the results and doing it again, asking how, and where to improve so that your business (or website) can attract the leads, sales and generate the revenue/income that you want.