Internet Marketing &
Business Promotion
7 Essential Steps to Web
Site Promotion
By Herman Drost
Web
Site promotion should be the major part of your web
site marketing plan. It's not enough just to design
a beautiful web site and put in on the Net. Promoting
your web site has to be done constantly if you want
to get a continuous stream of traffic to it. If you
don't drive traffic to your web site, your online business
venture will soon fail.
1. Create a web site marketing plan - if you fail to
plan then you default to a plan for failure. When designing
your web site, create a plan on how to market it as
well. Try to put yourself in your customers shoes when
doing this. It's too easy to just view your web site
from your own perspective. You need to have a clear
vision for your business, goals (short and long term)
you wish to achieve and the strategies of how you will
accomplish them.
2. Define your target market - many online marketers
promote their web site aimlessly in a field which is
too large i.e. they may use bulk mailing as one of their
promotion strategies. Of course you may get some visitors
but the chances are you will not make many sales. Why?
You have not narrowed your field of customers and targeted
them. If you sold Cadillacs online for instance, you
are not randomly going to market to every person on
the Net. Your target market may be previous owners of
cadillacs, or people who routinely purchase luxury American
cars.
Getting targeted customers to your web site, will increase
sales, because they will have more interest in your
product or service than marketing to a general audience.
3. Use several promotion strategies - don't just stick
to one form of promotion because you never know which
one will work the best for you. If you use many channels
i.e. search engines, email marketing, forums, writing
articles etc you have a greater chance of getting more
traffic to your web site.
4. Promote continuously - if you want to drive constant
traffic to your web site, you must promote it continuously.
Web traffic is the lifeblood of your online business.
For example, you could constantly optimize your web
pages for the search engines, resubmit them if needed,
visit discussion forums every day and write an article
for online publications every two weeks.
5. Calculate your return on investment (ROI) - this
means keeping track of how much money you invested in
your marketing plan and what profit you received in
return. This will avoid wasting large sums of money
thrown aimlessly into advertising.
If you calculate it takes 100 visitors to your web
site to generate one sale and with each sale you make
$10, then you shouldn't spend more than 10 cents to
get each targeted visitor and still make a profit.
In order to know which aspects of your marketing campaign
bring the most visitors, you must be able to monitor
visitor activity to your web pages.
6. Analyze your web site traffic - by analyzing your
web site traffic, you can determine what marketing strategies
are successful. You can then change them as necessary,
to boost the sales or services from your site.
Your analysis may include what keywords your visitors
are using to find your web site, which web pages are
the most popular and where your visitors are coming
from. These are essential statistics you should know,
instead of blindly promoting your web site and hoping
for the best.
7. Test, monitor and track your results - to run an
effective online marketing campaign, you need to constantly
test what works and what doesn't. Tracking the response
to an ad may cause you to refine it until it generates
a great return on the money you invested. Once your
results are satisfactory, you can then roll out your
ads on a larger scale and spend greater sums of money.
You should also monitor your site in the search engines,
so you can optimize your web pages for higher search
engine rankings. This will attract more visitors which
leads to higher profits.
Web site promotion strategies will differ for everyone,
and will depend a lot on your product, web site and
your personality. Try everything you can, record the
results, and see what works for you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the Author
Herman Drost is the author of the new ebook "101
Highly Effective Strategies to Promote Your Web Site"
a powerful guide for attracting 1000s of visitors to
your web site. http://www.isitebuild.com/web-site-promotion
|