Acclaimed Web Development & Online Marketing Blog

I see on craigslist all the time. Someone wants a website for their small business idea. They know that a website with a shopping cart is what they need, but once they have it and sales don’t start rolling it, they wonder why no one wants to visit their website or buy their product. What happened?

Well, it’s simple really. It’s not that no one wants to visit your website or buy your product it’s that no one knows it’s even online.

Most websites, especially popular website get more than 90% of their web traffic from search engines, but search engine don’t automatically put your website on the first page just because you’re online. You have to use a series of techniques called search engine optimization or SEO to show the search engines which keyword phrases your site should be listed under. You need to provide the search engines with unique content with those keyword phrases in it, so they know your site is relevant to those keyword phrases. Not just relevant, but more relevant than all of your competitors because if you want web searchers to client on your site, you need to be on the search engine’s first page for your keyword phrases.

While you’re working on getting the search engines to list you on their first page, which can take months, you can almost immediately bring targeted traffic and customers to your website by bidding for keywords through search engine marketing (SEM) or pay per click (PPC). In programs like Google Adwords, you can bid on keywords and only pay when someone clicks on your site. You can also advertise through social media marketing on sites like facebook.com.

Email marketing is another way you can bring visitors to your site. Building or buying an email list and email those customers that opt-in to your mailing list is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of bringing traffic to your site.

Online marketing is an essential part of success on the internet. No matter how great your product or how beautiful you believe your website design, it’s not enough to just put your website out there and hope for the best.

Well, they are both huge right now.  I don’t know which is growing at a faster pace.  I, for one, certainly jumped on the facebook bandwagon first.  It was an easy jump from myspace, but myspace is long gone in my book.  I’m still out there.  I think most of the 50 or so friends I had on myspace might still have myspace pages too, but I don’t login or even look at myspace unless someone sends me a message.  Most of the working adults I know never bothered with myspace, but facebook is a different story.  Just about everyone I ever worked with is suddenly on facebook.  I’ve found friends from college, high school and even junior high.

Well, then, along comes twitter.  I think I initially signed up for twitter because I saw an ad on facebook.  I signed up and then my account sat there for months.  I just didn’t get it.  I had no idea what to do with it.  Then, I started hearing about twitter on the radio.  Hmmm, I thought.  I have a twitter account.  Maybe I should take another look at it, but I didn’t.  Not for a few more months.  Then I started hearing about it from friends.  Then, I found a twitter feed and checked it out.  It was slow process for me, but I finally figured it out.

Twitter is a great way to get your message out there as often as you like in 140 characters or less.  Twitter is finally taking it’s place in social media marketing and in a big way.  I’ve found that by simply finding and following people in your industry, people start following you, people you don’t even know.

I feel like twitter is really just starting to take off and many people haven’t figured out what it can do for them yet, but once they do it’s going to be as big if not bigger than facebook, especially for businesses.  I also found another great website called twibs.com.  It’s only purpose is to provide a directory of businesses on twitter.  I think websites and programs that use twitter as there main vehicle of getting their message out there are going to be popping up like mad in 2009.  I can’t wait to see what will come out next.

A client recently brought up the idea of putting their website on myspace.com.  My response was to wonder if businesses are on myspace.com.  Isn’t business facebook.com domain?  Clearly not all social media marketing sites are directed towards businesses.  Many are directed towards people making friends and staying in contact with friends, so I decided to do some research on myspace.com to see if I found any businesses advertising.  I first looked for online book stores with myspace.com and found one that looked like a legitimate business.  Then, I searched for web developers and found a few, but only a tiny fraction of the web development businesses you would find on facebook.com.

My client pointed out to me that myspace.com is for bands.  She sells music, so myspace.com may very well be a great place for her to do a little social media marketing.  For most businesses, I would certainly recommend setting up pages on facebook.com and linkedin.com.  Join twitter.com and start following people in your industry.  Tweet everyday about your products, services and your industry.  Not only is twitter a great opportunity for people to find you, but you may actually learn a lot from twitter too.

Here is a list of social media marketing websites:

http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/04/02/looking-for-a-list-of-social-media-sites-i-have-them-all-here/