Promotion Is The Key To SuccessWritten by David Bell
Initially most important factor in attracting people to your site is its overall look and quality. We have changed our site several times since it was launched, each time updating and improving its content. The site must certainly not be static, it must be seen to be ever changing. It should be simple and clearly laid out and easy to navigate. Visitors don't want something that will take them too much time to get through as invariably they don't have that time! Promotion is key to success and we are only just starting to learn what actually works and what doesn't. Email for instance is one that just won't reap rewards. There's no point in emailing anyone and everyone who you might think is interested. You may get one or two positive responses from 300 emails. However rest may never read or simply delete what you send. One way of emailing that we have found to be a success is to reply to people's questions, problems and thoughts within a newsgroup. There will be several, if not, many newsgroups that will match your target audience. You have to remember that newsgroups have rules and regulations, and that you can't just post blatant advertising. You may be found to be in breach of these rules and banned! E-mails must be targeted to reach your audience and not sent out randomly. People get upset if you send too much unsolicited junk mail! Another successful way of promoting your site via email is to use a signature file. This is a small and effective tool. It just involves leaving your name, URL, email address, telephone and fax numbers at bottom of every email you send out. It is much easier for people to just click onto a URL than having to type it in, even if they have just a quick look. Flooding people with your site address is another must for companies promoting their web site. Put it anywhere and everywhere you think, on everything that is sent out. There are lots of promotional items that can be sent out with your URL on and these can be purchased relatively cheaply.
| | If You Build It, They Will Come...Written by Adrian Kennelly
...No they won't. On web, building a web site is not enough. If there are no links to site anywhere, no-one is going to visit it. The site won't even be listed in any of search engines without some incoming links. To get traffic, you will need to do some promotion.Web Directories The basic part of any promotion campaign, web directories, whist they may not generate much in way of traffic, will help in your site's search engine ranking. A good list of free, non-reciprocal, search engine friendly directories can be found at http://info.vilesilencer.com. Pay Per Click Advertising This is advertising such as PPC Search Engines, like Yahoo!'s Overture, and contextual advertising, like Google's AdWords. Be warned, it is very easy to go through a substantial amount of money for no reward using these services if you are not careful. AdWords (amongst others) lets you pick a maximum budget a day, but, although $5 may not sound like much, $5/day is $150+ per month. Better make sure your keywords are correctly identified, and, in preference, not highly competed on, and that your sales copy is good enough before doing this. Quality Traffic, not Just Traffic It's what everyone is after, more traffic to their website. Traffic is easy to obtain, though. Autosurfers, manual hit exchanges and purchased traffic will all send visitors to your website. However, this traffic is just visitors, many of whom will just burn up your bandwidth for no reward. Unless you are receiving decent money for pay per impression advertising, such as banners and popups, this traffic can be totally valueless. Repeat Traffic Unless you only require visitors to visit your site once, because you are selling a one-off product, and your sales copy is fantastic enough that they are hooked to buy on first visit (and if you are regulary doing this, write an ebook explaining how and sell it), you will want visitors to return. If there is nothing of value at your site, visitors may come once, but they won't come back of their own accord. Typically, it is estimated that a prospective customer will be exposed seven times to a product etc. before buying.
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