It is certainly true that good web content attracts browsers and site promotion increases total page impressions. But is it worthwhile?
Unless you sell online advertising, the sheer number of visitors to your site is irrelevant. You must attract the right kind - the people who will spend money with you. As your salesmen will testify, the rest are time wasters. The challenge is finding the good ones and the best way to achieve this is through effective targeting and promotion.
All the best targeting methods follow the same principle - self-selection. To leverage this, you concentrate online promotion on those areas where visitors have shown, merely by being present, that they are prospects. The obvious ways that people "self-select" on the internet are through newsgroups, mailing lists, reciprocal site links, viral marketing and the use of search engines.
Search engines are the number one source of new visitors to web sites, and Google is by far the most popular. Whatever else you do, make sure you are listed there. Identify phrases that people are using to find sites like yours, and make sure you have one page on your site that contains this phrase three or four times in the text. Use the same phrase in the page title and the meta description and keyword tags. You should also consider pay-per-click advertising – in which you buy browser adverts which just appear when certain keywords are used. For instance, if you were into internet commerce like my company, you could "buy" the word "E-commerce" so that when anybody enters this word on the chosen search engine, up pops your advert.
Certain sites have content relating to your business. If the site is not in competition with you, providing a reciprocal link can grow traffic. There are two ways to do this:
When agreeing mutual links with other sites, select sites that are likely to attract people who are also good prospects for your product or service. These might be local business sites, trade unions, or information sites. Having links on popular sites will also improve your search engine ranking.
Amazon has established a stronghold in affiliation marketing. Many a site has links with the well known book store for purchase of books related to the site subject matter. In return for referring the lead, the site receives a commission from Amazon. Smaller businesses can operate similar schemes where they encourage websites to place a promotional banner in return for a royalty on products sold.
You may also consider operating your own loyalty scheme to encourage repeat purchase. Regular customers may receive points to redeem against future products, or be given discounts as their spend with you increases. More sophisticated online store software such as Actinic Business allows you to introduce personalisation with individual password logins and customer specific pricing, so you can offer more regular purchasers better prices.
This is the online version of recommendations and usually occurs when people spread the word via email about your product or service. For viral marketing to be effective, your content needs to add value, be funny, informative or offer additional information. The impact of people passing on your site URL can be vast, so make sure your ISP can cope with the traffic.
Once at your site, you can make it easy for visitors to promote you with ‘email this to a friend’ and ‘tell a friend about this site’ functionality.
Also you should ensure that every outbound email from your company includes your website address – the most obvious way to promote, but often forgotten.
Most of the advice about newsgroups also applies to mailing lists. A mailing list is passive in the sense that you join and every email sent is copied to every other member of the mailing list. When you subscribe to a mailing list, you will either receive all of the postings that are made to the list or only postings that the moderator accepts. Sometimes you can choose to receive mailings in raw form (i.e. every posting), or in a digest form, which comes out once a day or once a week. Again, mailing lists are about two-way participation and are suitable for the same products and services as newsgroups.
You can also build up your own mailing list of customers and prospects who have contacted you or purchased. You may want to send a regular e-newsletter communication, or email special offers, news of sales and product updates. It is important to follow the guidance of the Data Protection Act and Advertising Standards Authority code -- request permission from your contacts before mailing. Failure to do this means that you are theoretically sending spam (unsolicited) mail.
Newsgroups (or bulletin boards) are places on the internet where you go to read and post messages. If you don't explicitly visit, you don't see the messages. Used with care they can be a valuable promotional tool. Making them work for you depends on the product or service that you offer and the size of both your business and typical customer. Here are some useful guidelines:
The majority of newsgroup participants are from small businesses or are consumers. If you are targeting corporate business, newsgroups may not be effective.
The type of product whose purchase can be influenced through these groups is a service or high cost item, where independent opinions and recommendations are valued to help the buying decision.
Newsgroups can be particularly effective if you wish to grow your international market or find foreign agents.
When participating in newsgroups you will get the best results by following these rules: