7
Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion
Copyright 2003 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.
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
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