Is your Business Website lonely?3 tips to help your small business grow online
Many people launch their online business or online presence for their bricks and mortar small businesses with completely overblown expectations. They’ve heard
statistics about how many new users come online every day and millions and millions of web searches that are conducted daily by web surfers. What they don’t often realize is that while there are over 1 billion people online, there are also millions and millions of websites vying for their attention. Simply having a website is not enough to generate traffic anymore. You must promote your site as much as possible to encourage people to visit your website. It’s similar to throwing a party but forgetting to invite anyone. You can pour drinks and lay out nachos, but if nobody knows about party, you’ll have a pretty lonely evening.
To beat loneliness that some businesses feel online, here are 3 low cost tips to draw some people to your website:
Write about your Topic: What is your website about? What are you selling? Whatever it is, you should be able to come up with a few ideas for articles that will be of interest to your audience and will establish your credibility in field. By writing short 500-word articles and circulating them on Internet, you’ll pick up some free traffic to your website. You accomplish this by remembering to add a resource box, or a byline at end of your article. It might read something like “Joe Smith is owner of www.bestplumbinginventionever.com where he offers his revolutionary new plumbing products for sale”. The article in this case probably had something to do with a challenge facing plumbing profession, hence readers were mostly plumbers. Joe essentially gets a free advertisement in his byline that is attached to his informative article.
There are a number of great sites online that will post your articles at no charge for others to read. Some of best include:
www.ideamarketers.com www.clickforcontent.com www.marketing-seek.com
Exchange Links: Links from other websites can be a substantial source of web traffic for your site. Not only will links generate traffic for you, but inbound links are one of key factors evaluated by search engines in determining ranking of your website. The key to linking is to go for quality, not quantity. Most search engines are now evaluating websites based on their relevant inbound links, meaning that a link from a webpage that has nothing to do with your business (i.e. a pool table company that links to your pet nutrition website) won’t do you much good. The best approach is to locate related businesses who are not competitors and approach them with an offer to link to their site in exchange for a link from yours. A good example would be a pool table company that links to a website belonging to a website about party games or pub games. The topics are related, but sites are not likely in competition with one another.
