7
Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion
7 Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion
Web Site promotion should be the major part of your website 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 website, 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 ranking. 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.
By: Herman Drost - 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.
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