Marketing Your Website

Now that you’ve developed a purpose for your website, decided on a domain name, determined which pages and features you want, and found your perfect webhost, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to get the word out. Just building a site won’t cut it. You’ve got to get people to come to it.

Search Engines

Search engines are the key to the internet. Without them, no one would be able to find anything. You may have found this article via Google or Bing.

Search engines need to know your website exists. Make sure you have your website submitted to major search engines like Google, Bing, and the open directory project, Dmoz.org. However, getting listed is only the start.

You need to make sure your website is able to be understood easily by search engines. Your pages will be indexed better and your content will be related to what the page is about. There is a lot of work behind search engine optimization, but making sure it’s done correctly will help bring in visitors. Talk with your web designer on how they will get your website into search engines, and how they plan to optimize it for them.

Message boards and blogs

One place to begin marketing your website is on message boards (forums) and blogs that fall within your niche (specialty). Message boards are often epicenters of community websites. People visit them for their specialized topics, participating by engaging in discussions, asking questions and giving answers.

If you’re a car mechanic, make sure you’re participating in car forums. Use the signature feature to instantly include a link to your website. This way, every post you make will include the link back.

Blogs about your industry are great places to involve yourself. You are often able to post comments on blog topics, so if you get a chance you should comment where you can offer advice or reinforce what the post writer is discussing. Don’t forget to use the website field to link back to your website.

Social Networking Sites

In the last few years, social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook have exploded around the world. They allow you to connect with people, sharing information instantly with millions of people. For businesses, it has allowed them to spread their message faster and farther than ever at almost no cost.

If you don’t have accounts on Facebook or MySpace, start one now. Update as often as you can, but don’t feel like you have to post something every day. It’s usually recommended to update Facebook and MySpace atleast once a week.

Twitter is a different breed of social networking. Its instant access to up to the minute information has made it a great tool for businesses. If you have anything significant going on in your business, you can share it on Twitter with the millions of members who use it every day. Using the search tools available from Twitter and 3^rd party providers, you can find out if people are talking about your business, offering another level of customer service.

Using social networking websites can allow you to spread word of your website into a wider audience: their audience.

Find out what’s going on

Trying to spread the word about your website isn’t enough. You need to know if it’s working, and if it is, what exactly is most effective. That’s where statistical programs come into play.

With website hosting companies offering tools like AWstats and Webalizer, you can track down when you’re getting the most traffic, and which specific keywords are finding your website. They can offer a basic idea of how popular your website is.

Another type of statistic tool is web analytics. These programs go deeper into tracking your website visitor information. With programs like Google Analytics, you are able to find out which city most of your visitors come from, how long they stay on your site, and even if they go beyond the single page that brought them to your site in the first place (or your bounce rate, as it’s called).

Offering comparative analysis, you can put different numbers against each other to find out how they relate to each other. For instance, you can compare your new visitor rate against your bounce rate. You might want to find out the way page views compare to the average time people spend on the site. Analytical tools can give you a much better idea of how effective your site is, down each page. This can greatly affect how your website content evolves.

Offline Marketing

Of course online marketing can only go so far. You still need to do offline marketing. Depending on how your business runs or how you plan to market it, different methods could be used. None the less, including your website address on your business cards, stationary, and mailers are highly recommended. Any promotional material we send out has our website address on it. It’s a good way to help spread the word.

Now that you have a few ideas on how to market your website, get to it. The more you can do to get people to your site, the more effective it can become at reaching its purpose.