Simple Website Marketing Tips for Businesses

You need to promote your website if it’s going to help you or your organization. Thankfully, you don’t have to be a web-developing guru to successfully drive people to your site. The basic guidelines for web-marketing are surprisingly non-technical, and follow good, common-sense marketing practices that you could use for just about anything. Before you hand your money over to professional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialists and services promising to increase your traffic ten-fold (how much of that is “quality” traffic? You have to wonder), read through these guidelines to make sure you’re already doing everything within your power to self-promote. The user experience matters. There are no tricks or shortcuts to circumnavigate this. If your site is an endless series of dead-ends leading to broken links, “coming-soon” placeholders and a layout that leaves your users guessing where to go instead of guiding them, your site is helping no one. Your website needs to help your users find things; it should present information in such a way that they want to keep clicking and explore your content. If you just lay out a schmorgusboard of information with little or nor regard for the structure and presentation, you’re going to end up not getting the results you’re after. Clean layouts, minimalist designs and simple, well-thought navigation schemes are critical elements in providing a good user experience. Before you start worrying about the background color for the menu or what you’re going to put under the umpteen different subsections of the “about us” page you’ve already decided you need (or perhaps been told) to look at the content you have. Layout your mission-critical information the old-fashioned way: with a pen and paper. Develop some semblance of organization and structure before it even gets to the browser. Design your site around your content - if you treat it like a slot you’ll be dumping your content into, you’ll just end up hurting the user experience. You need to define results in order to measure them. Quick - what is your site’s goal? If you can’t answer that succinctly in a sentence or two, you probably don’t have one. Or if you do, there are lots of things getting in the way. Don’t worry. Generally speaking, a website exists to accomplish one (or more, or all) of the following: <ul> <li>Sell a product  </li> <li>Generate leads / sign-ups  </li> <li>Promote an event, idea, organization or an individual’s endeavors</li> </ul> The beautiful thing is there are a myriad of tools out there that help you track your site’s success along these metrics. Finding and implementing those tools shouldn’t be your foremost concern; that’s why you hire experts to develop your site in the first place. All you need to know is what type of results you’re looking for so you can accurately measure how successful your site is down the road. Develop quality content. Lots of it. By definition, your site’s content is all you have to offer to your users, so it goes without saying that it needs to be good. It also should be original content, exclusively available through your site, if possible. You can develop quality, original content in a variety of ways, including: <ul> <li>Relevant, original articles, essays and papers.  </li> <li>Ongoing blogs, journals and columns.  </li> <li>White-papers and downloads.</li> </ul> Filling your site with lots of content works for you in two ways: it provides added value to your site for your users, and encourages repeat visits. This is particularly true when a blog, journal or other regularly updated content is available. These provide more content for search engines to index, thus increasing your site’s overall visibility. Spread the word. If you follow the previous section’s advice and develop lots of quality content, the search engines will do a lot of the promotional work for you by continually indexing your content and making it available via search. This organic method of propagating your content is ultimately the best approach, as you’re more likely to attract users who are interested in what your site has to offer. However, there are some relatively nontechnical things you can do to speed up the process. These include: <ul> <li>Submitting your site to relevant directory sites, social news sites and web communities. Any site that aggregates content from around the web, like <a href="http://slashdot.com">Slashdot</a>, <a href="http://digg.com">Digg</a>, <a href="http://www.reddit.com">Reddit</a>, <a href="http://newsvine.com">Newsvine</a> and even <a href="http://google.com/news">Google News</a> can do wonders if getting lots of traffic to your site. The catch here is getting the traffic to stick - if your site produces a popular page that’s submitted to one of these services, you will get repeat visits so long as you can continue to put out content people are interested in.  </li> <li>Guest blogging, or submitting exclusive articles and content to high-traffic sites in exchange for a link back to your site. Generating lots of traffic is a little difficult when your site is relatively unknown. If you know of a high-traffic site that’s in your niche, consider contacting them and offering exclusive content you’ve created in exchange for a link back to your site. This is similar to how a freelance writer might try to get his or her work published for free in a high-profile publication.  </li> <li>Getting relevant, high-traffic sites to link back to yours in meaningful ways. The previous point would also fall under this category, but you aren’t just limited to writing articles for other people’s sites. If your site is selling a product, perhaps you could try to get a high-traffic site to review your product with a link back to your page.  </li> <li>Invest in online advertising. This approach would depend on the nature of your site, but there are a great variety of online advertising programs out there that can help extend the reach of your site. The complexity of setting up successful online advertising campaigns is a little too much to tackle here (you may consider hiring an expert to help you), but the pricing schemes generally adhere to either CPC (Cost-Per-Click), CPI (Cost-Per-Impression), CPA (Cost-Per-Action) and Affiliate campaigns</li> </ul> You should be careful NOT to: <ul> <li> Excessively spam and post to public forums. An occasional post to announce a new product, review, publication or general announcement is fine. Just use your best judgment and avoid constantly reposting the same information over and over. Users will get sick of it; search engines will catch on; it makes the web an uglier place when you do it.  </li> <li>Pay for inclusion in any type of directory. There are directory sites out there that generate a lot of traffic and charge people for being listed. Because of the way this practice can skew search results, it’s considered bad form and many sites have been massively penalized for it. Other than it being a waste of your time and money, inclusion in one of these sites might actually do more harm than good for your site’s search engine rankings by association.</li> </ul> In short, there are no shortcuts. Successfully marketing your website shouldn’t seem like something you need a specialized degree in. While there are tricks and tips on the technical side that you might want assistance with, these things are more useful as a way of “fine-tuning” an existing site that has already followed the practices covered here. The beauty of these basic website marketing practices is that they aren’t just good for your website; they’re good promotional practices for the overall health of your business, organization or endeavor. 2008-03-03T18:37:22Z

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simple-website-marketing-tips-for-businesses

2008-03-04T21:10:17Z

An introduction to basic marketing techniques any business or individual can employ for his or her website.  This is a great place to start if you're new to Internet marketing and need to become familiar with terms and concepts.

Simple Website Marketing Tips for Businesses

2009-02-24T09:43:18Z