| Getting noticed on the web
is the holy grail of most webmasters and
rightfully so. Not only can you turn
visitors into dollars, if done properly, but
it also gives a feeling of accomplishment.
In all honesty getting people to your sight
is really not that difficult. There is
probably 1000 things that you can do to
attract visitors. The real trick is making
use of all of them. The mistake that a lot
of people make is believing that there is
one magical way, some mystical ritual that
will invoke the visitor magnet spell. Ok, so
I'm being facetious but the reality is it
does take work and diligence to make things
happen. This is by no means a complete list,
for a beginning webmaster or someone who is
interested in becoming a webmaster, to
follow. I am going to assume that an idea
for a web site has already been decided
upon.
1. The web site itself. This is a very
important aspect of web marketing but I am
focusing primarily on external web
marketing. There are, however a few things
that I want to cover here because I believe
they are very important. CONVENIENCE This is
a big one. People today are accustomed to
getting things fast from drive thru
pharmacies to high speed internet. Instant
gratification has become the rule of the
day. With this in mind, web pages should
load quickly. Believe it or not a 4 second
load time for a page is extremely slow
today. When the page is loaded potential
customers expect to find what they are
looking for immediately. Your site should be
very well laid out and everything should be
easily and quickly navigated. The brick and
mortar days of putting the most popular
items in the back so customers have to walk
through the whole store are not effective
for online businesses. This strategy should
be avoided at all costs. Some studies have
shown that if customers do not find what
they are looking for in the first 15 seconds
they will move on.
2. The first steps in getting the word
out. Visit the popular business directories
like
http://dir.yahoo.com,
http://sbd.bcentral.com,
http://yellowpages.aol.com. There are
hundreds more.
3. Search engine submittal. A lot of web
sites offer this service for a fee. I
personally have never found it worth it. I
recommend doing this yourself. It is easy
and does not take that long to do if you
submit it to the top search engines.
4. Forums. Get to know your market. There
really is no better research than visiting
forums related to your market and reading.
Find out what your customers concerns are.
Keep reading until you feel comfortable
enough to post. Don't spam the forums and be
sure to read the rules for posting. A lot of
forums will allow you to leave a link and
some will not. Either way make sure you
respect the guidelines for posting. I did
come across a trick for getting recognized
by search engines. Most forums allow you an
avatar. That is a picture that appears when
you post. You can usually set that up in
your preferences when you sign up at most
any forums. Typically it is a link to
offsite where the picture is hosted. Make
sure it is hosted from your web site and
named after it. I made a bunch of avatars
for a lot of friends and hosted them from my
web site. To my surprise, it definitely
caught the attention of the search engines.
You goal here is to help not only advertise.
After long enough you might just be the
person everyone has questions for.
By starting with these four marketing
strategies you can lay the foundation for a
strong presence on the web. It will not
happen over night but it will increase the
popularity of your web site. Remember, web
marketing is a cumulative proposition. The
more marketing strategies you use the
better.
About the author: Casey Tyler is an internet
marketer and owner of
http://www.totalnettechnologies.com.
He can be reached at
ctyler@totalnettechnologies.com. |
