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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:

1. Do you have business cards? Add your web address to them.
2. Got a yellow pages ad? Add your web address the next time it comes due for renewal.
3. Do you advertise in the newspaper? Don't forget your web address.
4. Have a sign over your shop? Add the web address to it.
5. Do you have company letterhead? Get the web address added there, too.
6. 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.

If you're like most business people, you've probably already talked with many "SEO" experts trying to get you to purchase their services. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

We have a different viewpoint of SEO from the rest of our industry. Unlike most of our competitors, we think SEO is largely a waste of time! Most of what people in our industry sell as SEO is based on old, outdated information that no longer applies and (in most cases) no longer works.

Oh sure, there are certain, very simple things you should do with your website to make it easier for Google to find it. As most people know, this involves making sure that your preferred keywords appear in appropriate places on your web site. But really, as long as you include them in your text, divided among the pages where they should really go from a customer's point of view, you've already done most of the SEO that needs to be done.

You can also read our article that talks in more detail about search engine optimization by clicking here.

Instead of SEO, we focus on a very simple secret, one which most SEO experts overlook. We don't want to clue in our competitors, so I won't tell you what that secret is on this web page. However, here's a hint we can share up front. The secret has everything to do with what made Google such a successful company from "day one" in the first place!

Call us at 540-428-2787 to find out what we can do to help you with search engines, and we'll ask you about your current marketing situation. In the course of our conversation, we'll share the simple secret with you.

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 significant combination of time and money. It's highly competitive and no longer the bargain that it once was. However, we can advise you about the most economical ways available to maximize your online exposure that fit your budget and your situation.

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.