7 Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion

7 Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion

Copyright 2002 Herman Drost



Web Site promotion should be the major part of your web site

marketing plan. It's not enough just to design a beautiful web

site and put in on the Net. Promoting your web site has to be

done constantly if you want to get a continuous stream of

traffic to it. If you don't drive traffic to your web site, your

online business venture will soon fail.



1. Create a web site marketing plan - if you fail to plan then

you default to a plan for failure. When designing your web site,

create a plan on how to market it as well. Try to put yourself

in your customers shoes when doing this. It's too easy to just

view your web site from your own perspective. You need to have a

clear vision for your business, goals (short and long term) you

wish to achieve and the strategies of how you will accomplish

them.



Read this article "The 7 steps to creating a marketing plan"



2. Define your target market - many online marketers promote

their web site aimlessly in a field which is too large i.e. they

may use bulk mailing as one of their promotion strategies. Of

course you may get some visitors but the chances are you will

not make many sales. Why? You have not narrowed your field of

customers and targeted them. If you sold Cadillacs online for

instance, you are not randomly going to market to every person

on the Net. Your target market may be previous owners of

cadillacs, or people who routinely purchase luxury American

cars.

Getting targeted customers to your web site, will increase sales,

because they will have more interest in your product or service

than marketing to a general audience.



Read this article:

"How to target your customers and put them in a buying mood".



3. Use several promotion strategies - don't just stick to one

form of promotion because you never know which one will work the

best for you. If you use many channels i.e. search engines,

email marketing, forums, writing articles etc you have a greater

chance of getting more traffic to your web site.



4. Promote continuously - if you want to drive constant traffic

to your web site, you must promote it continuously. Web traffic

is the lifeblood of your online business. For example, you could

constantly optimize your web pages for the search engines,

resubmit them if needed, visit discussion forums every day and

write an article for online publications every two weeks.



5. Calculate your return on investment (ROI) - this means

keeping track of how much money you invested in your marketing

plan and what profit you received in return. This will avoid

wasting large sums of money thrown aimlessly into advertising.



If you calculate it takes 100 visitors to your web site to

generate one sale and with each sale you make $10, then you

shouldn't spend more than 10 cents to get each targeted visitor

and still make a profit.



In order to know which aspects of your marketing campaign bring

the most visitors, you must be able to monitor visitor activity

to your web pages.



6. Analyze your web site traffic - by analyzing your web site

traffic, you can determine what marketing strategies are

successful. You can then change them as necessary, to boost the

sales or services from your site.



Your analysis may include what keywords your visitors are using

to find your web site, which web pages are the most popular and

where your visitors are coming from. These are essential

statistics you should know, instead of blindly promoting your

web site and hoping for the best.



Read this article: "How to analyze your web site traffic"



7. Test, monitor and track your results - to run an effective

online marketing campaign, you need to constantly test what

works and what doesn't. Tracking the response to an ad may cause

you to refine it until it generates a great return on the money

you invested. Once your results are satisfactory, you can then

roll out your ads on a larger scale and spend greater sums of

money.



You should also monitor your site in the search engines, so you

can optimize your web pages for higher search engine rankings.

This will attract more visitors which leads to higher profits.



Web site promotion strategies will differ for everyone, and will

depend a lot on your product, web site and your personality. Try

everything you can, record the results, and see what works for

you.