1. Focus your target audience
Depending on the size of your audience you may want to focus on your particular niche. The amount of potential traffic may lower but remember, these visitors will be more in tune with your particular niche - and will be more interested in what you have to offer. For a small business, an example specific sector might be "Solicitors Services in (your town/city)". For help on figuring out your keywords (what words and phrases people use to find your website on a search engine) you can try out the Google Keyword tool.
2. Give your customers freebies
This might be controversial for you if you're a business, but information can be considered a valuable freebie. You can make yourself the expert in your field and can give out useful information for your potential customers. For example if you ran a garage website you could provide a free e-book on how to do basic vehicle checks like check your oil, air pressure and water level. Then you can market this free e-book as part of your service. Then go crazy with the marketing of this 'freebie'. There are lots of ways to give something to your customers for free, without actually leaving you out of pocket.
3. Engage your customers
This could be an elaboration on the above. Give your customers reason to come back to your website and interact. A regularly updated blog with useful info related to your area of expertise can add to your search engine rankings. Give them a testimonials page or guestbook where they can say 'hi, you guys were awesome, thanks!'. Some social marketing websites might work for you, such as facebook and twitter. However don't lose sight of who your customers are. If you have a retirement home website, you may not find your customers on sites like facebook and myspace! Do you sell a special niche product? If you're not shy about being in front of a camera, get a video of it on youtube with a demonstration of its benefits. Remember though to keep it informative and engaging, not too salesy! Youtube is an information medium, rather than a place to sell.
4. Put your website out there!
This is most important of all. Your website won't get traffic by simply 'being there'. You get out of it what you put in. Now I'm not claiming to be a marketing whizz but here are a few ideas to help you get started. The important thing is to be creative, and target your main audience at all times.
- Use your web address in all your print media, business cards, print ads. Make a point of mentioning your website to everyone you meet. That includes friends and family, businesss associates. They might not have a need for your business, but they might know somebody who does. Which leads me to...
- Get your customers to refer other people, and reward them for their efforts.
- Join a couple of forums relevant to you and post away, remembering to include your link in your profile signature (the best way to do this is mentioned in the left hand column).
- Try and get a press release or media coverage of your site in the local paper.
- In your print advertising you could offer 'online only' discounts available on your website.
- Team up with other websites related your field, and trade links. A wedding dress website could swap links with the local florist, caterer and wedding jewellery websites.
- Use as many online mediums as you think is appropriate to your website. Post comments on other peoples blogs, review the service and products of others, Upload photos to websites such as flickr, twitter on twitter! All these things can bring -apart from curious visitors-backlinks to your website which = better search engine rankings!
- If you have a budget, consider using a pay per click campaign such as Google Adwords. They appear on the first page of search engines results under "Sponsored Listings".
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | related link |
( 2.9 / 319 )
Back
Avatar
