So you’ve got a website. What now?
March 20, 2009
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.
