Getting noticed on the web is the holy grail of most webmasters
and rightfully so. Not only can you turn visitors into dollars,
if done properly, but it also gives a feeling of accomplishment.
In all honesty getting people to your sight is really not that
difficult. There is probably 1000 things that you can do to
attract visitors. The real trick is making use of all of them.
The mistake that a lot of people make is believing that there is
one magical way, some mystical ritual that will invoke the
visitor magnet spell. Ok, so I'm being facetious but the reality
is it does take work and diligence to make things happen. This
is by no means a complete list, for a beginning webmaster or
someone who is interested in becoming a webmaster, to follow. I
am going to assume that an idea for a web site has already been
decided upon.
1. The web site itself. This is a very important aspect of web
marketing but I am focusing primarily on external web marketing.
There are, however a few things that I want to cover here
because I believe they are very important. CONVENIENCE This is a
big one. People today are accustomed to getting things fast from
drive thru pharmacies to high speed internet. Instant
gratification has become the rule of the day. With this in mind,
web pages should load quickly. Believe it or not a 4 second load
time for a page is extremely slow today. When the page is loaded
potential customers expect to find what they are looking for
immediately. Your site should be very well laid out and
everything should be easily and quickly navigated. The brick and
mortar days of putting the most popular items in the back so
customers have to walk through the whole store are not effective
for online businesses. This strategy should be avoided at all
costs. Some studies have shown that if customers do not find
what they are looking for in the first 15 seconds they will move
on.
2. The first steps in getting the word out. Visit the popular
business directories.
http://dir.yahoo.com/,
http://sbd.bcentral.com/, http://yellowpages.aol.com/#,. There
are hundreds more.
3. Search engine submittal. A lot of web sites offer this
service for a fee. I personally have never found it worth it. I
recommend doing this yourself. It is easy and does not take that
long to do if you submit it to the top search engines.
4. Forums. Get to know your market. There really is no better
research than visiting forums related to your market and
reading. Find out what your customers concerns are. Keep reading
until you feel comfortable enough to post. Don't spam the forums
and be sure to read the rules for posting. A lot of forums will
allow you to leave a link and some will not. Either way make
sure you respect the guidelines for posting. I did come across a
trick for getting recognized by search engines. Most forums
allow you an avatar. That is a picture that appears when you
post. You can usually set that up in your preferences when you
sign up at most any forums. Typically it is a link to offsite
where the picture is hosted. Make sure it is hosted from your
web site and named after it. I made a bunch of avatars for a lot
of friends and hosted them from my web site. To my surprise, it
definitely caught the attention of the search engines. You goal
here is to help not only advertise. After long enough you might
just be the person everyone has questions for.
By starting with these four marketing strategies you can lay
the foundation for a strong presence on the web. It will not
happen over night but it will increase the popularity of your
web site. Remember, web marketing is a cumulative proposition.
The more marketing strategies you use the better.
About the author:
About the author:
Casey Tyler is an internet marketer and owner
of
http://www.totalnettechnologies.com. He can be reached at
ctyler@totalnettechnologies.com .
