By John Eberhard
Considering that there are currently millions upon millions of websites up on the web, just putting up a website unfortunately does not guarantee that anyone will see it. It is necessary, even vital, once a website is completed, to aggressively engage in website marketing.
How does one market a website? Here are the most important ways:
- First of all, put your website address onto all promotional items that your company has, including all business cards, brochures, info packs, catalogs, ads, direct mail pieces, etc.
- Put up a Google AdWords campaign. This allows you to put up a paid ad that will appear whenever anyone types in the keywords you select. One of the big advantages of this is that an AdWords campaign can be put up in a few days, and start driving traffic to your web site right away.
- Link Building: This is where you get links put up on other web sites linking to your site. This is the main criteria that Google uses to determine how high your site will be ranked for certain keywords. Link building divides into several actions:
- Blog: Put up a blog, link back to your main site from it, and post to it regularly (once a week). In your posts, link back to your main site, and every time you post, notify the blog search engines.
- Press Releases: Write press releases about your business and submit these to online PR sites. I recommend having a separate blog for your press releases, link back to your site, and notify the blog search engines each time you put up a new release.
- Article Directories: Write articles of 500 words or more, about a topic in your industry but not blatantly promoting your company, and post them to article directories like www.goarticles.com. Include a “bio box” that describes your company and gives your web address.
- Social Media Marketing: Put up corporate pages on Facebook and Myspace, linking to your web site and your blog(s). Also take your articles and post them on sites like Squidoo.com and HubPages.com.
This is just the short explanation of course. There is much more to learn about these actions to get the maximum return. But you should know that marketing a web site is a fairly big job, it is a challenge, and for the most part it is not something that can be done overnight. A Google AdWords account can be started right away, but the actions listed under “3” above will take months to bring to fruition.
