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Seven Questions | Marketing Your Website

Added by David Coleman on 18 March 2011

If people don’t know you exist, how are they ever going to find you?

This is the sixth and final article in our "Seven Questions to Ask Yourself Before Getting a New Website" series (there were two questions in the first article!). This time we're focussing on marketing your website.

The majority of small business websites purely exist as online brochures. While any good-looking website will serve as a point of reference for you to direct people to, in order for your website to actually bring you new leads, people need to be finding your website themselves. Unless you can afford to spend time yourself building the online presence of your website, you’re going to find it hard to get any new business from it without an advertising budget.

The fastest and easiest way to get potential customers to your website is through online Pay Per Click advertising. For example, the most popular system is Google’s Adwords that shows adverts down the right hand side and sometimes at the very top of the page when people search.

You tell Google when you want your advert to show by giving them a list of search words that you want to trigger your advert.
It doesn’t cost anything for you to have these adverts display; only when they are clicked on by an interested individual. You set a daily budget you’re willing to spend so it can’t run away with your bank balance. Once this limit is reached, your adverts stop being shown.
The amount you pay when someone clicks depends on the amount of competition and where you want to appear in the list. Read more on our Pay Per Click Advertising page.

The flipside to PPC marketing is “free traffic”. If you can get your website to show up at the top of search results for phrases relevant to your business, and which people are actually searching for, potential customers will start finding their own way to your website.

The general theory behind getting your website to the top of the search results is quite straight forward:

• Get links from other websites pointing to your website, as search engines regard these as votes of trust
• Provide useful and relevant content that is of real value to people
• Update your website regularly with such content so that your site doesn’t appear stale

Other sources of free traffic you may want to look into include article marketing, social media networking and marketing, keeping an informative blog and building relationships with other bloggers and actively taking part in discussions on website forums.
Again, the success of your website comes down to either how much effort you’re willing to put into it yourself, or allocating a budget for the tactics mentioned above.

In Conclusion
When you start spending money on getting people to your website, you need to be confident that it can convince them to buy or pick up the telephone, and this is where having answered all of the above questions will pay off.
The overall aim of your website, and indeed business strategy should be to provide a consistent, authoritative and trustworthy message from your advertising right the way through your website to the sale and beyond into aftercare and repeat business.