Website Promotion

Success on the Internet is all about attaining visibility and traffic for your site. Professional website promotion and web site marketing services address both of these areas.

Just imagine how hard it is for people to find your site when the Internet is growing by about 50-million pages a day! Having a web site and not promoting it, is like having a store in a mall with no signage on it… very few people are going to just walk in.

Definition

What is website promotion? In its simplest terms, it is any technique or service used to increase visibility on the Internet to bring more visitors/ traffic to a website. Think of it as an all-encompassing word describing various promotional techniques that can by utilized individually or in combination to form a solid, cohesive, online promotion strategy… see Website Promotion Chart for a visual representation.

Web Site Promotion Techniques

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): focuses on getting a site to appear near the top of search results returned by search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), paid inclusion, directory registrations, and link building exchange are all forms of SEM.

Email Marketing: focuses on running an email campaign to existing and potential customers for promotional purposes. It is an inexpensive form of advertising but has been overdone --most people regard 'unsolicited' email as 'spam' or 'junk'.

Banner Ads: focus on using graphical ads that appear on websites and provide a hyperlink to the advertised web site. They can be logos, animations, graphics, images, or plain text. Banner ads are better for 'brand awareness' purposes than for revenue generation. Click-through rates are less the 1% and the ads are usually sold based on 'impressions' (how many times an ad will be viewed) rather than 'click-throughs' (how many time an ad is actually clicked on).

Publishing Articles/ Newsletters: promoting a website through publication. Reasons for writing articles/ newsletters include sharing information, showing gratitude, and helping others to do or learn something. Highly regarded by the general public and can be used to subtly advertise your products/ services and to establish yourself as an 'authority' in your field.

Affiliate Programs: focus on accomplishing Internet marketing success by offering a revenue sharing program to get other websites to drive traffic to your web site. The affiliate web site receives a portion of the income generated. Also referred to as associate, referral, sponsor, partner, and reseller programs.

Copywriting/ Press Releases: focuses on writing 'copy' or press releases that help to promote your company, products, or services. Well-written copy can have a profound affect on sales. Press releases are newsworthy stories about your business that you submit to the media in hopes gaining exposure. The general public is much more receptive to stories they see/ read in the media than to advertisements.

Web Site/ Event Sponsorships: focuses on becoming a sponsor of a web site, event, or contest. Believe it or not, there are many opportunities for this on the web… you just need to put the time into finding them --better for raising 'brand awareness' than 'revenue generation'.

Multiple Domains: focuses on purchasing/ owning many domains to reach specific markets. Reasons for pursuing this strategy include better results in search engines, having multiple entry points for your business, branding/ promotion efforts, revenue generation, protection, and providing regional content.

What Is The Best Technique?

Only you or your marketing/ sales/ advertising department can best answer that. You have to decide what it is that you are wanting do and then implement the promotion strategies that will help you accomplish your marketing goals and objectives.

Each of the above services/ techniques has its pros and cons and not all can be, or should be, tried at the same time --unless you have a very large advertising budget. Having said that, it is important to realize that more than 85% of Internet users rely on search engines to help them find what they are looking for --if your business in not appearing in the top-20 rankings on the major search engines, you are missing out big time on the opportunity to reach out to new customers.

Many Internet marketing experts will tell you that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one, if not the most, cost-effective forms of promoting a web site. In fact, SEM strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) have the best Return On Investment (ROI) of any form of advertising… both online and offline! And they deliver the kinds of customers every business is looking for… customers who are actively looking for products/ services close to the time they are looking to make a purchase!

How To Select The Right Company

It is important to remember that before you can decide on which website marketing company to work with, you first need to decide upon which of the above techniques/ services you want to employ for your online business venture.

By knowing this you accomplish a couple of things. First, it helps you to better define your online marketing goals and objectives. Second, it dramatically shortens the list of companies that you will need to research and talk to… with so many companies out there, finding the right one is no easy matter.

What To Look For In A Company

* offerings -what kinds of services do they provide
* techniques used -do they do ethical or unethical website optimization
* history -how long have they been providing these services
* clients -will they provide client names/ references for you to contact
* industry standing -how are they regarded by their peers in the field
* qualifications -what are their professional credentials/ designations

You should carefully consider all of the above before making any definite decisions and keep in mind that costs and the level of service you can expect will vary from company to company. And like everything else in life, you get what you pay for so don't short change your business by selecting the least expensive service. Competition for top rankings is fierce and is getting tougher all the time as more and more businesses develop, implemeng, and maintain online website promotion and link building strategies.

And be realistic with your promotional expectations. Is it fair to expect top rankings with a monthly budget of $500 or less when your competition may be budgeting anywhere from $1000 to $20,000+ per month? Yes, it is possible to achieve top rankings --but are you willing to put the time and money required into it?

An Art & Science

Website promotion is not an exact science but an art, and because the search engines are always making changes to the algorithms they use to rank web pages, there is no one solution that fits all sites. But if done properly, it can have a profound impact on profits... there are many, many successful businesses out there whose only source of income is their web site. These businesses know and understand what Internet Marketing is all about and are committed to implementing successful strategies for the long-term… you must start thinking the same way.