When I first started developing web-sites, the internet as we know it today didn’t exist. There wasn’t a Google, no one had ever Twittered a Tweet, Facebook and Craigslist weren’t yet even an idea. Yahoo! existed but all you had to do was fill out a form to submit your site to it and there wasn’t much verification of a site’s content prior to indexing it. That was the hay-day of abused meta tags telling a visitor “what a site was about”. Meta tags were synonymous with “Search Engine Optimization” at the time. If you built a site people would probably end up finding it because, well there weren’t that many sites out there – dumb luck would lead people to your site eventually. Thankfully a lot has changed. Sadly most companies’ approach to marketing their site has not.
Launching a site is something to get excited about. We’ve launched hundreds over the years and to this day seeing a new site linked to a URL still gets us stoked. Launching a site, though is like opening a brick and mortar store for business. Yes a lot of work has gone to get you to that point. Yes you are now “open for business”. And yes, everyone that got the business or site to that point should be proud of seeing their hard work available to the world. Very few business owners, likely even fewer successful business owners, would open the doors to a traditional store and just assume that customers would pour in. They would market, raise awareness, sponsor events, do promotions, collect information from their customers and try to get customers to tell their friends about the new establishment. Often times for online endeavors, this step is forgotten, overlooked, ignored. The reasons are wide ranging, we don’t have the: time, money, resources, knowledge, ability, etc. I would ask this though. Do you have the time to let this business fail? If it fails, you flushed the money to develop your site down the drain, are you ok doing that? If your answer to either of those questions is no, read on.
Glad you made it this far.
So your site has been launched, what now?
SEO
Search Engine Optimization should be an on-going part of any site. Good SEO can not happen with out utilizing tools such as Google Analytics to tell site owners how visitors (and search engines) are interacting with your site and its pages. Analyze the data and create logical business decision as to what pages need help and where your site is falling short. There are a plethora of tools out there that will help you find target key words and phrases. Time spent here every week will pay off big in the traffic arena.
Social Networking
Social networking is one of the fastest growing sectors on the Internet today. Much has been written about how to use tools like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc as ways to connect with your market – heck we even wrote an article ourselves. These powerful tools allow you to connect with your audience quickly and in a less formal manner than available through a traditional website. These networks can drive traffic and SALES to your company – in June of this year, Dell announced it had earned $3 million in revenue from using Twitter. New tools from Facebook allow people visiting your site to easily share any page with their friends. Stay on top of developments in this area – it’s likely to become a bigger and bigger part of how traffic is driven to sites.
Blog
A blog helps out a website in so many ways that we could write multiple blog posts just about that topic. In a nutshell though, here are five reasons why every site needs to include a blog component.
- Search engines like sites that are updated frequently – blogs provide an easy way of updating your site.
- Anything can be a blog post – got a cool photo from a customer – boom you got a blog post – get written up in the newspaper – bang blog post
- Blogs can start a conversation with your customer base – where traditional sites only talk to customers
- Blogs offer a way to show your customers your “fun side” – you don’t have to be as “spit shined” on a blog as you need to be on your site
- People will keep coming back if you keep having things to tell them
Email Marketing
Ad agencies have been prompting clients to do “mailers” for decades now – email marketing is just a logical extension of that practice – only about a bazillion times better. Here are a few of the reasons why:
- Good email marketing starts with an organically grown list – customers and contacts that WANT to hear from you
- There is no postage with email (that’s a 44¢ savings per email)
- email marketing is measurable – you can calculate an actual ROI from it – do that with a mailer.
- email marketing software manages your list for you – people opt in and occasionally opt out
- email marketing can be passed on vitally – i doubt anyone often resend something they get in snail mail to a friend
- email is green – green is cool keen
Promotions/Contests
This is probably one of the most creative areas that a site owner can use to market their site.
Do you make something? Offer a service? Create a contest where customers submit their stories of using your product – award the winner with your product and create a blog post about them.
Have a new product coming out? You could let your customers help you name it – either through an online contest or a poll.
Want to drive random traffic? Use Twitter to announce a give away – hide the registration for the giveaway on your site. I mean who doesn’t like iTunes gift cards?
Um ok…
This post could go on forever, the possibilities of what can be done to market a site are virtually endless. The point here is be creative, take the time, and spend the money to make your site successful – it deserves a fighting chance.
If this is all too much but you think it’s a good idea – we can help out too, give us a call we’d love to help out.
