From: Quentin Brown Promoting your web site is essential. Once you have built your pages and uploaded them to your server it does not mean you will get thousands of visitors. This is probably one of the greatest misconceptions about Internet Marketing. It is like opening a store. Unless you are willing to pay thousands of dollars for the right position, the chances are, you will have to promote. The Internet is no different, but it does not have to cost you a fortune. We will look at using Google Adwords in a separate section as this is probably the fastest and easiest way to get your business going and drive targeted people to your business.
Measure Your Efforts The most important factor to consider when advertising and promoting your site is to measure the response. I met a man who believed that if he could have his site rated in the top ten on the search engines he would get the traffic. He spent literally hundreds of dollars and many hours achieving his goal only to find that a month later some other sites took over his position. He did increase his visitors for a while, but for the effort and expense it was definitely not worth it. He was selling plans for some very nice furniture he had designed. I helped him to set up a system where he advertised in five different arena's and measured his responses. The search engine response was only 10%. His magazine ad and articles bought him 40% of his visitors and we also received around 10% from ezine advertising and the last 20% from Google Adwords. By this you can see, that if we do not measure the responses, then we can fall into the trap of spending 100% of our time for 10% of the response. He now spreads out his time and money proportionately to his return. In fact it worked out he spent 50% less time and money to get over 600% more business. Another great reason for measuring your efforts is to calculate what different effects technology has on your site. For example a site of one of my friends was getting a lot of traffic but people only stayed for a short time. We added a little bit of audio from his video DVD and the rate of viewing increased and time spent on his site increased dramatically. This meant that people after listening to the audio looked more at the rest of his site. Have a look here. It must also be noted that traffic does not a great website make. One of my sites gets little traffic however it is very targeted so the conversion for the sale is very high. Another of my sites gets a great deal of visitors however the sale conversion rate is very low. Getting lots of visitors is great for the ego however it can also chew up your bandwidth and if it is not having the desired results then it can be more of a hindrance than a help. It's Not All Internet It is important at this stage to mention that not all of your promotion will necessarily be on the internet. Lets take the local basketball team. You may be able to put the web address on the back of the players shirts, advertise the site in the newsletter you send out and even put the site address on your car. There are plenty of non internet ways to advertise your site very effectively with little or no cost.
Say you have a business site. You could also use the above techniques. You could compile your website into a multimedia format and put it on a mini cd to distribute or even leave it as it is and distribute it on a floppy. We talked about relative links in the workshop and this will enable you to run your site on your computer at shows, etc. without having to log onto the internet. You could use it in demonstrations, etc. This is why it is so important to plan your site carefully. Search Engines The important thing when promoting to the search engines is to use some of the auto programs around that will shorten this process. I think however that you should do it by hand for the major search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. Preparing your pages for search engines is very important. You need to set your meta tags, which is some text that will not be seen on your pages, but which reside in your HTML. There are a number of sites that will prepare these meta tags for you. You simply enter your sites key words, etc. and then it will generate the tags for you, which you then copy and paste into your pages. Your web site should also have good keyword and content about your topic. There are some great Ebooks around on preparing your site for search engines as well as some good free articles and information. Just do a search on Google or a popular search engine. This is not meant to be a comprehensive tutorial on search engines as they are changing the rules often. Lot's of people have varying opinions on what is important. Just think of what you search for and then use that same principle. Many experts are now saying that it is not just key words but key phrases that are important. One tool I have found very helpful especially for business sites is the overture search suggestion tool. You can enter the words you feel best apply to your site and see how they rank. Go here to try it out. Try entering Internet Business and you will see a good ranking. Try for rankings in the thousands at leat. If you put in home business notice the difference. If they are to much then look for niches within that cartagory. Here is a good tutorial on search engines. Click here. Of course this is just the basics as they are changing all the time. If you want a good dtratergy just keep adding good content. Articles Get High Quality Traffic by Writing ArticlesOne of the best ways to promote your website is by writing articles that you can post in e-zines, and sites that provide free content to e-zine publishers. This will help you develop credibility and, with time, build a solid customer base. There are a few things to take into account to maximize the effectiveness of this sometimes overlooked marketing technique:
Technology There is so many new opportunities out there to help make your business stand out. Bloggs, podcasts, video etc. By utilizing these forms of new technology you can offer tips and tricks, business information etc in a new format. Podcasts especially are taking off and are relatively easy to do. Here is an interesting one for you to see how powerful they are. You could get interviewed also if you become an expert. PodCast Radio Show
In today's PodCast Radio Show, Live from the PodCast Marketing Promenade we look deeper into PodCast Marketing and today's Internet Marketing Tip, How to determine your focus and ultimate positioning pertaining to Internet marketing. Also, We take a trip to the PodCast Marketing Green Room. Today we find Internet Streaming Audio Specialist, Quentin Brown awaiting in the Green Room. We discuss streaming audio and the how and why you should include multimedia within your web site. Tomorrow, you are invited to join Tony and PR great, Annie Jennings in a free, one hour seminar all about Ezines This is a great way of targeting your visitors. You can either develop your own or advertise in some of the many ezines around. Make sure you learn a little about headlines that will draw interest and also a little about writing effective copy. Choose an ezine that complements your information. Again do tests to measure the effectiveness of this type of advertising. Joint Ventures This is an area I have found particularly successful. By linking up with some other people who are wanting to advertise their products or services, which might have similar or complementary products or services, you can reach a targeted audience for little or no cost. Let's look at the local basketball team again. You might contact some of the local tourist sites or businesses who would let you put a link on their site for a reciprocal agreement. This can be a great way also to learn more about growing your site so it is more attractive. You see this all the time offline where different advertisers help promote each others products. Of course if you can really become the authority in your field you may get to go on Opera and become an instant success. I think you get the idea. Banners & Links Banners and links are another way to generate traffic. Basically what is involved is you putting some html code that they supply into your WebPages and every time someone goes to that page you will receive a credit. Depending on the group you join, your ad will then be put on other sites in the group. There are so many different programs that allow you to do this type of promotion and I feel that it is very dependant on your product how effective they will be. Having said this always develop some different size banners for your product so when people want to promote it for you they are ready. Forums, Newsgroups & Chat This is a little more time consuming, however, can also generate some traffic. I guess you would call it word of mouth. By looking for groups that are talking about similar interests you can direct them to your site. Be considerate as these are sites and groups are looking for quality input not just a sales spiel. Opt in Lists These are normally free lists available through listservers such as: http://groups.yahoo.com Read through the results of your search and watch for lists that allow the posting of ads. Rules of each list regarding how often you may post, may vary, so check the rules of each list. There are more classified pages on the Internet than you could ever hope to post your ad to, so the trick here is to find the ones that have a good flow of visitors who read and respond to the ads there. Start out by choosing 10-20 classified ad sites (depending on your time available) and begin placing your ads. Place ads at these same sites on a regular basis. Some good ones to start with are: Do these types of free advertising work. Well there are those who say yes and those who say no. The whole point is to try a bit of this and a bit of that. You will soon see what works and what doesn't. If you have a niche market then just target your niche audience. NB: Doing a little bit of everything also gives you better link popularity. Do a bit each week and in the end youll be all over the net, even in the backblock where they say nobody goes but they do. Submission software Most of the submission businesses use one of these two software programs to submit your webpages for a fee. You can do it all yourself and even help your friends and business associates. Simply enter your Web Site details into Dynamic Submission and press a button. This incredible search engine submission program will automatically submit all your web sites to 1000+ major Search Engines within minutes (complying with all the search engine submission guidelines) and also provides you all the tools to get your web site to be listed on the TOP positions. Dynamic Submission is Search Engine Submission Software at its best. http://www.dynamicsubmission.com/ Get higher search engine rankings, more customers, and more sales! Software and Shareware Submission.
I have just started to use Promosoft and it is a great piece of software. To everyone who is familiar with shareware development, it is well-known that a new software creation often takes much less time than its promotion. It is also known that a great part of the time spent on promotion is not always spent very effectively. On the contrary, a lot of time is usually spent on routine and mechanical form filling while submitting your software information to numerous software sites and archives. It is obvious that you have to submit your software to as many sites as possible to reach more customers, but how can you do this spending as less time and money as possible and yet having provided high accuracy and reliability of submissions? Download Your free trial copy here. If you create software then you have a great market of shareware sites that will accept your software and this can be very lucrative. Download the Pad submission tools here. PAD is the Portable Application Description, and it helps authors provide product descriptions and specifications to online sources in a standard way, using a standard data format that will allow webmasters and program librarians to automate program listings. PAD saves time for both authors and webmasters. RoboSoft is a submission utility for shareware authors. The program helps developers to submit their products to 700+ software archives with outstanding accuracy and usability.
RoboSoft fills out submission forms automatically, makes search queries on Internet sites for a given software title. RoboSoft remembers all login information for every site. In addition it can produce reports showing the submission status of a software product. RoboSoft supports PAD. RoboSoft requires MS Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. There are plenty more ways to promote your website but this will give you a start. |
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