3 Cost Effective Ways to Market Your Website
The web is a big place, and it’s easy to get lost. You need to make sure your voice can be heard above the clamour of businesses jostling for buyers’ attention and loyalties. An impressive web site is useless in the absence of an accompanying marketing strategy, because when you get down to it, your web site is there to generate business. Your return on investment is the key.
No matter how compelling your web site content, how engaging your web animation or how user friendly your eCommerce process – your web site venture is pointless if your beautiful and finely honed web site never graces anybody’s computer screen. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and online marketing strategies raise brand awareness and visibility and are critical features of any successful online marketing strategy. Research suggests, on average 75 percent of your prospective customers will turn to a search engine to find your product or service online. So what can you do to get found?
To perform well in search engines you must think like a search engine. Search engines aim to deliver high quality, valuable content to the people searching for information. This should be the foundation for all you online marketing tactics. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques change over time as programmers try to beat the system in order rank higher while the Search Engines develop new technology to stop the cheats. Companies who use many of the quick fix tricks run the risk of having there site blacklisted. It is important to get trustworthy SEO advice. You should take advantage of trustworthy, expert knowledge and experience and ignore the fads.Trying to cheat the system and trick search engines tempts many however in the long run, is bound to bring you unstuck.
1. Blogs and RSS Feed
Search engines love content and they love websites that are updated regularly. Including a blog in your website is a sure fire way of increasing your content regularly. Before starting a blog you need to be sure you can commit the time required to create new articles regularly. You should aim for at least one new article per week. The more articles the better as long as they are high quality and informative for you target market. If you have a blog you should make sure it includes an RSS Feed. RSS Feeds are a way people can subscribe to your website content and have it delivered to them directly via an RSS reader. Once this is setup, it’s a hands off system so it really is a cost effective way of marketing your business.
2. Social Media and Bookmarking
The internet was originally created to be a way of colaborating and sharing information. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have really taken the web to the next level. They are a fantastic way of extending your marketing reach. Social media allows you to disseminate information directly, quickly and with little fuss to a broad range of potential customers. You should setup your own Social Media accounts and build your subscriber lists to these accounts. That way you can quickly and effectively send our your marketing messages to the masses at no cost to your business, you should be carefully not to be always ‘selling’ via social media but sharing valuable information, the type of information your target market would want to subscribe to. You should also make it easy for people browsing your site to add your content to Social Media and Bookmarking sites, for example take a look at the icons listed below under ‘Enjoyed this article?’ and the Subscribe box in the right hand column of this website.
3. Email Blasts
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which has been used (and abused) for quite some time now. You can uses eMail as a means of communicating commercial messages to a database of subscribers. There are many advantages of this form of marketing. It’s instantaneous and direct nature makes it a popular strategy for many businesses. It’s significantly cheaper and faster than direct mail, brochures or printed newsletters. It also better enables you to gauge the success of your campaigns by directly measuring positive or negative responses from your customers, measuring open rates and correlating sales with marketing. Sending direct promotional emails can be a great strategy to convert prospects into new customers. It can also help persuade existing customers for repeat business. It can also build loyalty and educate your customer base regarding your business products and services.
There are many benefits for eMail Marketing when it is done well. Make sure you don’t break spam laws, if you do the negative impact on your business could be significant. Besides being illegal, email marketing without permission is more likely to have a negative impact on your brand since it will be seen as a nuisance. Over the years, email marketing success rates have been on the decline due to a flooding of the market. It is still a useful way of marketing your business, providing you have something valuable and interesting to say. We would suggest using it to support your other online marketing strategies such as blogs, bookmarking and social media.
