Seven Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion
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.
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