Promote your Website
Many of our customers have asked us how they can increase their website visibility to potential customers. There is no simple answer to this question. There are two primary ways to accomplish this. One is with your traditional off-line business promotions and the other is through an online strategy
Promotion and marketing of your site through all the potential mediums is important to position yourself for a successful online presence. Remember it does not happen simply because you publish a website. It happens because you drive traffic to your site just as you do with a bricks and mortar business presence today.
Traditional Promotion
The first thing to remember is to promote your website with all the methods that you are currently using to promote your business offline. Make sure you include your e-mail and web address on all of your business cards, stationery, and other offline promotional materials, such as:
Direct Mail
Direct mail has historically been a very successful medium for generating sales opportunity in traditional "bricks and mortar" businesses. Direct mail can be used to promote the website and special promotions that may be found on your website.
Brochures and Fliers
Make sure that all your brochures and fliers clearly identify your website address.
Newspaper and Magazine Advertisements
Each ad should clearly indicate the website address. Remember that you can offer discount coupons or promotional items that are redeemed by visiting the website.
Radio, Television and Cable
If you are using broadcast advertising ensure that all ads finish with a clear statement of the website address as well as a telephone number. Without a telephone number they cannot call you, without a website address they can't find you online.
Product labels
If you use product labels on any equipment you sell or install you will probably have service and support telephone numbers. You should also have you website address on these labels.
Signs
Signage on your store and any signage on company or service vehicles should have the website address as well as telephone numbers
Press releases
Any press releases that you do should clearly indicate the website address and email address as well as other contact information.
Novelty items
Pens, mugs, magnets, calendars, and other items you give to potential and current customers
If you ever use novelty items in promoting your business make sure the website address is included in contact information.
Phone Conversations with your Prospects
A powerful way to promote and use your website is while you are on the phone with your prospects. Often people are sitting by a PC with Internet connection. If they have questions about or are confused by the different offers, programming or promotions, ask them to go to your website and walk them through the information. Our clients have told us this saves them time and allows them to close new clients faster. It also makes them look VERY professional, and they are likely to tell their friends and family about the experience.
Online Promotion
In parallel with the traditional promotions you may want to consider an online promotional strategy. The major methods of online promotion include:
- Search Engine indexing (indexing means being recognized and ranked by search engines)
- Banner advertising
- Email marketing and promotion
- Affiliate Marketing
In this newsletter we will only deal with Search engine indexing and affiliate marketing. We believe that email marketing has largely been compromised by email spamming and is far less effective than it was 12 months ago. Having said this, email marketing can still be very effective with private customer lists where trust has been built.
Banner advertising works if it is effectively targeted to groups where your products and services have perceived value. "Shotgun" banner advertising across websites that bear little relevance to your products will have little value and very poor ROI.
In this article we will address how to best be listed with search engines for free (we spent time discussing Pay Per Click (PPC) listings in our last newsletter). In separate articles we will also provide some simple steps to "optimize" your home page for search engines and some guidance on how to set up an affiliate program using Decentrix AffTraq.
How to Submit to free listings on major search engines
There have been significant changes to free listings in recent months. Yahoo made major changes to its offerings and free submissions disappeared for a period of weeks. However the most important search engines still have free submissions (they are not always easy to find however). Submission to Google, Yahoo and MSN basically gets you to more than 80% of all searches on the web for US sites. How do we submit to these sites?
Google
Free submission to Google is very simple. Follow the steps at: http://www.google.com/addurl.html. It will take 6-8 weeks for the site to be indexed and there is no guarantee that Google will list the site.
Yahoo!
Click here for Free submission at Yahoo
You will need to sign up for a yahoo email address and provide some personal information. It will take 4-6 weeks to be indexed and there is no guarantee that Yahoo will list your site
MSN
Free submission to MSN is available at: http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm provided by the Inktomi search engine. It will take at least 30 days for your site to be indexed and there is no guarantee that MSN will list your site.
For more information, read our other articles on how to "optimize" your home page with the Decentrix website solution and our article on affiliate marketing.
Submittal Frequency
Once you submit your site to search engines, have patience. It takes several weeks to be recognized and "spidered" by the engines. Whenever the content of your site is changed it is a good idea to re-submit your site to the engines, but do not submit simply to "encourage" their interest. This is considered bad form and may result in you being flagged as spamming. In general, do not submit your
