Marketing Your Website

Market my website? Why should I have to spend time and money marketing my website? It's supposed to be marketing my business!!!

That'show so many business owners feel, they spend a bit of money on theirwebsite design and then sit, doing nothing, waiting in vain for it tostart paying dividends and bringing in the customers.

It'svery simple really, nobody is going to come to your new site if theydon't know about it - if they don't see mention of it, a link to it oraren't recommended it.

So how can you get your website noticed? Here's a list of the common methods you can use:

Traditional Ads & Marketing

Search Engines

Online Directories

Links Development Campaign

Participation in Online Discussion Forums

Article Submission

Pay Per Click

Banner Ads

Traditional Marketing
Magazine& newspaper ads, Yellow Pages, PR articles, leaflets & doordrops, business cards, email signatures, company stationary, companyvehicles, the front of your store. These and many more are places youcan and should advertise your website's URL.

Search Engines
Gettingto the top of a keyword search on the major search engines - Google,Yahoo etc. - is high on the wish list of most website owners.Unfortunately it's not something that will happen straightaway. It cantake many months of adding content, getting links from other sites andoptimising your content for keywords to get a high listing.

Online Directories
Directories are collections of website addresses that are collated by human beings. Most will charge a fee for inclusion, DMOZ/ODP is the one
everyonewants to get listed in - it's free and will have a great effect on yoursearch engine ranking, but expect to wait months if not years for alisting.

Links Development
This is one of the mostpowerful ways of promoting your site. It means getting other (hopefullyrelated) sites to include links to yours. To get a link simply emailthe site owners and ask for one. Often you'll have to reciprocate thekindness i.e. link to their site as well but some will be happy to listyour URL for nothing.

Marketing Your Website

If you're a member of local businessgroups then don't forget to include your web address on their sites.What about all your suppliers, can you get a listing on theirs?

Notonly will you get people visiting your site via all these links, you'llalso improve your position on search engine listings (search enginesalgorithms take the number of links to
your site to be an indication of its importance).

Discussion Forums
Anotherway you can attract attention is by participating in online discussionforums (to do with your area of expertise of course!). Most will allowyou to include a website link in your
signature, i.e. a link to your site in every post you make.

Article Submission
Thisis a brilliant way of getting noticed. If you don't have any problemswriting essays then get your pen out! There are many sites that allowyou to submit your articles for free and
they should all allow you to include a resource section on yourself or company with a link back to your site.

Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a very good way of driving traffic to a site in the short term. Google's Adwords is one of the best known PPC systems around,
Overture provide another.

Whensomebody searches for keywords in Google you get a list of 'sponsoredlinks' on the right hand column (go to Google and search for 'cateringwork' and see the sponsored links on the right). The owners of thesites don't pay anything unless the person browsing clicks through totheir site.

Banner Ads
It might be worth putting upa Banner Ads on sites you know your prospective clients are likely tovisit. The ads, which will be made to click through to your website,come in GIF format or, increasingly, are created in Flash for a morestriking and memorable ad.

Pricing is often Cost Per Click(CPC) but most common is Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM). CPM isrelated to how many people see your ad.

As you can see,there are many ways of building up traffic to your site. If you've gotproducts, services or content that people want and you're willing toput some effort into some of these methods then you will soon start tosee a rise in
visitors.

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