A Website Without a Marketing Plan Is Just An Electronic
Brochure That Sits In The Closet
Are you like most people? Do you think that if you put up a
good website, people will start knocking on your door? If so,
you've fallen for the oldest "urban legend" on the
Internet.
A website is nothing more than an electronic brochure. Like
a regular brochure that your local printer can make for you,
electronic brochures aren't any good unless you put them into
peoples' hands. A brochure is just one of the many tools
available to you for marketing your business, but the tools
won't do the marketing for you. You have to do that.
When people think about marketing a website, they first think
about search engines. That's natural. However, that's not
where you should start.
You should start with offline marketing. Sound strange? It
shouldn't. If you've been in business for awhile without
having a website, that's where you customers have come
from...offline sources. Some examples include listings in your
local yellow pages, ads in your local newspapers, handing out
business cards, putting signs on your company vehicles, or
just having a good location on Main Street.
Your first focus should be on including your new web
address in all your existing marketing. Your web address will
be something like www.mydomain.com. Your web address should
say something about your organization or business. Most good
web addresses simply include the organization or business
name. That's usually best. Whenever possible, keep it
short-and-sweet, to make it easier for people to type it into
their browsers.
Here are some more tips about offline marketing:
- Do you have business cards? Add your web address to
them.
- Got a yellow pages ad? Add your web address the next
time it comes due for renewal.
- Do you advertise in the newspaper? Don't forget your web
address.
- Have a sign over your shop? Add the web address to it.
- Do you have company letterhead? Get the web address
added there, too.
- In fact, anytime you give any written material about
your company or organization to anyone, include your web
address.
OK, now that we have you focused on the important forms of
marketing you're probably already using, let's take a moment
to discuss what you really came to this page about. Search
Engines.
Marketing on Search Engines
When we design your website, we also submit it to Google,
Yahoo! and MSN. That means that once they visit your website
and add it to their listings, people will be able to find it
by typing in your web address into a search. Other search
engines will get it from those three, but those are the main
three that get 90% of the search traffic. But that's just the
first step.
It used to be that all you had to do was get listed in the
search engines, optimize your web pages, and you were done.
Then came the Google revolution, and everything changed.
Google's original innovation was the idea that (in very
simplistic terms) whichever website got the most votes from
other websites (in the form of links) wins. That's the basis
for what has made search on Google so much more accurate and
likely to deliver the best results to searchers. It has also made
the young founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin into billionaires.
Search Engines are a huge topic with lots of nuances. The
bottom line is this. While it used to be that you could do
well on search engines for little or no time or money, that's
no longer true. Marketing on search engines, no matter what
approach you take, requires a large combination of time and
money. It's highly competitive and no longer the bargain that
it once was.
We'll ask you to answer two vitally important questions
regarding search engines. First, is your website's topic
suited to massive search engine marketing? Second, what kind
of budget for marketing can you afford? Your answers to those
two questions will provide the framework in which we can help
you develop an effective online marketing campaign.
Contact us to get these questions
answered about your website and for further assistance.
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