The Tricks To Website Promotion

By: Eric Menzies

Your web site marketing strategy is the essential factor that determines the success or failure of a business web site. This is true whether your web site is an extension of an offline business, or you run an completely online business. Web site marketing is unlike any marketing you may have done using other media. However, marketing your web site on the internet shares many common core marketing foundations that underlie your marketing efforts regardless of the media you use. I am a strong believer that for a small business, all marketing should be based on the old direct marketing mantra of attention, interest, desire, and action. In this article I am going to discuss those aspects in terms of how they crucial in marketing your web site on the internet.

No matter what the media, nothing happens unless you attract the attention of prospective buyers. This a foundation of the successful marketing of any business. In internet marketing this concept is often evaluated by the traffic that you receive to your web site. However, the factors that determine how much traffic you can generate are only somewhat related to the actual content of your web site. The amount of traffic you can generate to your web site comes down to how skillful you are at the two fundamental ways one gets attention in any media. You can earn it, or you can buy it.

Earning your traffic results on the internet can be found in what are called 'free' and 'organic' search results on Google, Yahoo and even MSN. When prospective customers do a search on an internet search engine, they find the results most relevant to what they searched for which are the 'free' and 'organic' results. Any ads found are discussed below. Many people assume the results that rank the highest are the 'best' results in some way. It's really a winner takes all game! If your site isn't on the first page of results, then your web traffic will be diminished. If you don't make it to the second page of results even, you might as well not be listed at all since most people don't go past the second page of results at most. This style of web marketing is called 'search engine optimization'. If you don't want to do this yourself, you can hire a search engine marketing firm instead. Winning at getting customers to your site and on the top search engine searches isn't rocket science, but is part science and part art that requires constant work and attention to maintain keeping your site on the top searches so customers can find your site and possibly purchase your goods or services.

One of the most effective ways to increase internet traffic is buying some form of advertising. One of the most pervasive forms is banner advertising. Originally, these were very popular forms of advertising, but as they became more prevalent, their effectiveness waned. They can still be effective as long as you have a clear marketing strategy and are able to track your advertising statistics. Text advertisements are probably the most common form of internet advertising today. Google has paved the way, and if done correctly, your internet traffic can multiply quickly by using Google ads. MSN and Yahoo also offer text advertisements on their sites. One downside to text advertising is that the cost can add up fairly quickly, depending on how many hits you receive for your ad. Each time a searcher clicks on your text ad, the provider charges you a set amount. Another way to increase traffic to your site is to buy traffic from someone who has an e-mail contact list or has a lot of traffic on their site already.

As you can see your web site marketing strategy must first be focused on getting attention. Attention first requires that someone is exposed to your message. You can earn the exposure, you can buy it, or like many businesses you can do both. Earning the attention is a long term focus and requires skill and consistent commitment of resources. However, it pays off almost indefinitely and likely much cheaper in the long run than buying it. Buying the attention is much faster to get results and allows you to test ideas without committing the resources to earn attention. Any comprehensive web site marketing strategy is likely to include both methods.