Posting tweet...
Perhaps you have attempted (maybe more than once) to have a website. You may have signed up late at night on one of the countless web hosting plans that are on the web and for only $7.95 you were up and running. Or maybe you went all out and hired a web designer spending a thousand dollars or more having them build your site and shopping cart.
You dreamed of that customer hundreds of miles away logging into the Internet, searching on Google or Yahoo and easily finding your offering. You thought of how many more clients you would have and you thought to yourself, "if I could just get one extra client per month from my site, then I would make $XX, XXX.XX more money." So you built your site and waited and waited.
But no one showed up. You haven't even gotten one single customer from your efforts and expense. You failed on the web. You joined the ranks of millions of others that have gone before and will go after you. Your website failed.
You are not alone. Out of the almost 56 million websites on the web, fewer than 500,000 of them have any real traffic to speak of. Let me say that another way. There are over 55 ½ million websites on the Internet that are complete failures because they have no real traffic. (People coming to the site). So if you have been one of those 55 ½ million, don't worry, it happens to all of us.
What is failure?
What is failure? Quite simply, a website with little or no traffic is a failure. Without traffic on your site, then how could anyone ever contact you or hire you? How can they find out about your offering or product? How would they know where you are located and that you have the exact thing that they are looking for?
Let's examine the reasons that websites fail on the Internet and begin thinking about how we can avoid these normal pitfalls in creating our new site or revamping a current site. Below you will find the 10 main reasons that websites fail.
1. Websites fail because of lack of content. In my opinion, there could not be a bigger reason of why websites fail on the Internet today than lack of real content. Content needs to add information to the web. It needs to add value to the web and be something fresh, new, or a differing opinion. Content is writing about your particular subject or offering in such a way that it helps your rankings with the major search engines.
I am not talking about sales pitches here. I am talking about writing real content on your site that answers a question for a searcher. You have to remember that people on the web are looking for information, not you. When they put in a search phrase like "homes in Charleston, SC" they are looking for information, not a particular real estate agent.
Search engines will analyze your site to see if it offers answers to particular searches that are made through their services. If it does, then for that set of keywords, you may be ranked (and ultimately get more traffic.) If it doesn't, like the great majority of sites on the web, then you will never be found.
2. There is a general lack of planning before signing up for a domain. There are so many people that sign up for a domain by selecting domain names like, "haylorchurch.tv" or "bobsmithscrealty.net".
There are almost no bigger mistakes to make than to sign up for the wrong domain. Why? People on the web are not searching for things like "Bob Smith"; they are searching for "Charleston homes for sale." And in the above example of Haylor Church, the domain screams, "the .org was taken, so I took the .tv that was available." Both of these examples are big mistakes. Your domain name should answer a question that is being asked and describe your offering. It should describe action, not identity.
Sure, Yahoo and Google don't have a name that answers a question, but you are not Yahoo or Google. You are just someone who has a site and you would like to make some money off of it or draw new church attendees or meet new people. Whatever the case, you should choose a domain name that is descriptive of your offering and the overall theme of the site.
3. Most website owners don't update or proofread their sites. I know that it is hard to believe, but there are lots of people who spend thousands of dollars on a website only to let it sit there and do nothing for them. I cannot tell you how many sites I have visited with glaring mistakes in language, verb usage or vocabulary. I have seen the English language torn apart on supposedly professional websites. I have visited sites with tons of broken links instantly turning me away, never to come back. When people click away, they won't come back.
Not much will make a surfer click away from your site faster than errors and broken links. Those problems are so easily fixed, but people fail to check their sites on a regular basis. However, just having a grammatically perfect website is not enough. You have to be constantly adding and updating your information to it so that the Search Engines will want to keep putting you at the top of their lists. When the Search Engines visit your site with their spider programs, they look for the last time the site was updated. The more it is updated, the better ranking you will enjoy.
4. Websites fail because of too many banner ads, colors, flashy text or external links. Websites that look (and are) one huge ad or one big sales pitch will usually fail. Why? People see hundreds of ads each and every day on billboards & TV. They hear them on the radio while they are driving and they see them all over the web. If your website is not focused on what you do, then surfers will click away.
There are tons of other websites that will create banner ads for you to place on your site. Don't do it. They don't work, they won't make you any money and you are just helping that company's search ranking. Only provide external links on your site that help your business because an external link is a way for the surfer to leave your site. They can get distracted and not ever return to your offering.
5. Way too much money is spent for a website, hosting, setup and domain name. There are some web designers who are making an absolute fortune on the public just because they don't understand how the web works. Hear what I am saying here. Your investment in your website should be like other business investments that you make. For example, let's say you are a water ski retailer. You consider bringing in a new line of water skis. Would you immediately buy thousands of dollars worth of skis without knowing if they will make you any money? Of course you wouldn't. You would bring in a few, test the waters (pardon the pun) and as they made you more and more money, you would increase your inventory.
The same applies to the website, which is just an advertising medium. Start out with a simple, but professional design. Don't spend a lot of money on it at first. $500 for your first year is very reasonable. Then, as the website brings you customers and clients, you increase your offering perhaps by adding a shopping cart, or more fancy graphics.
6. Website owners don't spend enough time researching keywords. Keywords are an important part of how a Search Engine finds your website. Choosing the right keywords doesn't mean coming up with a list in your head. It means spending some time using web-based tools to help you find what people are actually searching for when using the Internet. Wouldn't you like to know what people are searching for before writing pages on your website?
There are so many tools out there that it is beyond the scope of this article, but as a reason for failure, this is one of the big ones.
7. People do not spend time optimizing their pages to be found by search engines. Many people will pay for a "Search Engine Optimizer" (SEOs) that will get them to the top 10 on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. They do this before writing good content, analyzing their own keywords, and making their sites user friendly. The S.E.O. companies that offer these services are keying in on the fact that most people are ignorant about how a site gets into the top positions on the major Search Engines.
Let's get something strait. Search Engine Optimizers cannot and will not get you into the top ten for the words and searches that you want. If they could, then everyone would use them and everyone would be in the top ten. Please remember that only 10 can be in the top ten for each keyword search and those are the ones who have built their pages with the content that puts them there and keeps them there. If an S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimizer) does get you to the top ten for a day or so you won't stay there long.
The best computer engineers in the world work for Yahoo, Google and MSN and they will not be tricked into letting you into the top ten, the top thirty or the top 1,000 for that matter. They will let you in if your page offers relevant content that their searches are looking for though. And, once you make it into the top ten the honest way, it is really hard to drop out of it.
8. People that have websites don't respond to visitors in a timely manner. It simply baffles me, people do not respond to inquiries on from their websites. Recently, I contacted several real estate agents when I was moving. I was relocating to Charleston from Denver which is 1,600 miles away and I found some agents that I thought could help me out in finding a home. I sent emails to them all (about 5 of them) and only one emailed me back within 24 hours. The others either waited over a week or did not email at all. That is a whopping 80% with poor response times.
I cannot tell how this will kill your business. Of course I chose to work with the one that did contact me and we were in a home within 60 days. Point is, you have to email visitors back quickly or they will find someone else. Not only do you need to respond quickly, you need to respond professionally and you need to let them know that you read and understand their email. You should include all of your contact information and you have to use 'spell-check'.
9. People fail to register their sites on the local search engines: Did you know that the major Search Engines are pouring millions of dollars into developing their local searches? What does this mean? I believe that in three to four years, the major SE's will overtake the Yellow Pages as the number one medium for searching a local business. Engineers are working around the clock now to create formulas that will point searchers in the right direction and towards local vendors that can meet their needs.
Everyone from dentists to hair salons who don't show up on the local search will be at a disadvantage. In my estimate, a full 90% of sites are not showing up in the local searches and will be passed by their competition very soon.
10. The biggest reason that websites fail is when people do nothing. Yes, there are so many things you can do wrong that will make your website basically useless, but the worst one of all is not having a site. Today people surf the web. This is just a fact. The Internet is no longer a luxury; it is used daily by millions and millions of Americans. They are searching for your help right now and if you don't have a place on the web where they can find you, then they won't.
Bill Nixon is a website designer, owns a hosting company and manages several sites for businesses and nonprofits. His latest project is here http://www.coastalvideography.com You can also visit his main site at http://www.sc-site.com for more insight on making your site better.
This is the last part of a three part series dealing with guidelines in how to plan, present and develop your company's website. In part one we explored the importance of having a professional website to represent your company online. In part two, we identified the quality approach of planning your company's website.
Now in our last part of these series we will take a quick look into the website design, development & marketing aspects and your company's image.
Company Brand
First step when looking into website design, development and marketing is concentrating in your company's logo. Your company logo should be the focus point of your website - remember: it is all about your company. Your marketing material should all look similar - business cards, printing materials, online PDF's - all should deliver the same message and have the same connection.
The mainly objective of your website design, development and marketing is to connect prospective clients with your company. They are all alone there, without any sales person to guide them and explain how the company works so make sure it can stands on its own merit. Your website must present your company well as there will be no human factor once a visitor comes around.
Search Engine and User Friendly
A website is not a brochure! When concentrating in your company's website design, development and marketing, all materials should be created accordingly with online marketing. The copyright for a website is not the same as used on your printing materials, images have a special format and size, colors should be wisely used, and navigation should be easy with absolutely no dead ends.
Building a search engine friendly website is not a task that every website design and development company can manage, so make sure you do your home work before hiring a web site design, development and marketing expert. To create a website that is search engine friendly, the team of professionals working on your website need to have the knowledge and expertise on search engines; how they work and index websites. If a website is not built taking into consideration how search engines work and the criteria used to index sites in their database, it will probably be invisible to search engines robots. They will not be able to index your site properly or maybe not to index it at all.
Another common mistake is to hire a website design and development company that has not enough knowledge on search engine algorithms and might put your website in a great risk using spamming techniques. With the incredible growth of websites being indexed -- about 11.5 billion websites indexed with search engines -- you want to make sure the company working on your website has the expertise to build it to be seen.
Search Engine Optimization [SEO] & Search Engine Marketing [SEM]
If you offer products or services that Internet users are searching for, you certainly should look into having your web site indexed with search engines. Building a search engine friendly website is just the beginning; you need to make the website will be found by potential users searching for the products and services you offer.
Potential customers are more and more using the Internet and search engines to look for products and services they need and want and having a website that no potential customer can find is a waste of time and money. Use your website as a marketing and online sales tool.
Over the past few years of the web's evolution as a key business tool, shows that an effective website mines prospects that other vehicles do not reach, shortens the sales cycle - in many cases dramatically so - and delivers early and consistent ROI.
Monitoring and Measurement of the Product
The capability of being able to evaluate, validate and verify if the effectiveness of your SEO campaign is critical. Reputable Search Engine Optimization [SEO] & Search Engine Marketing [SEM] companies will provide you monthly reports showing your current status and suggestions for areas to that need improvement (number of visitor per page, time spent, referrals, exit pages, high traffic pages, keywords being used, etc).
Use the information above as guidelines and always use common sense. Your website should be an extension of your company's image online and present the same standards of quality and customer appreciation.
Now that you are ready to start, don't forget that creating a website has lots of work involved but also lots of excitement. In the process of building your website, you are also expanding your company and giving it new form and shape.
You must be full of enthusiasm to start or redesign your website now. Have fun!
Carla Reis President Quest Quality Solutions ---------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2005 - Quest Quality Solutions. This article can be reproduced in its entirety, if the author credit is retained and there is a prominent source link to www.questqualitysolutions.com.
Carla Reis has a Bachelor Degree in Arts and a Diploma in Web site Design; she also has several years of experience in Web site design training, Search Engine Optimization, and management. Carlas experience with Web site design and Search Engine Optimization [SEO] began when she was the training manager for one of the biggest Search Engine Marketing companies in North America. She developed the companys training manual and SEO certification exams to better qualify the staff and deliver high quality services to the companys clients. After managing the training department and organizing the working flow and distribution for the company, Carla decided to venture on her own. She started her company in 2004 Quest Quality Solutions. What began as a one-person business has expanded to a team of professionals and has been growing in a steady pace.
Most people spend their energies looking for a great website designer, but often neglect to choose a good website host. For most people they start examining their web host carefully only when their website goes offline because their web host goes down. While we cannot prevent such an occurance totally, it will help if you choose a good website host. This article covers three reasons why you should spend some time looking for a good website host.
This article covers three reasons why you should spend some time looking for a good website host.
1. Lost of sales
Any business owner knows that when your website is down, you lose sales. It's that simple. Spending time looking for a good website host with minimum downtime is important as it can allow you a good rest at night knowing that your internet sales websites is running like it should.
Mary an internet business owner had a problem with her web host and true enough the web site server went down and her ecommerce website also went down with it. To add to her troubles, she was running a Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign with several Pay Per Click Search Engines like Google Adsense, Overture, Findwhat and she had to quickly disable all her ads until her website came online again. She later realized that she should have spent some time looking for a website host that was not only value for money but had a good reputation.
2. Lost of Advertising Revenue
Another business model online involves advertising and content related websites. These websites provide lots of free content but make money when people click on contextual and banner advertising on these websites. Some popular websites have many visitors a day and the loss of advertising revenue can be staggering.
Yahoo.com in a celebrated case was down one day after a massive Denial of Service Attack. Although it had nothing to do with a web host, we can all learn a lesson from this. If your website is advertising supported and advertising is your main monetization income stream then, you need to choose a website host that can ensure that it stays up and has a reliable connection to the internet.
3. Inability to grow your website
Another reason to choose a website host is that when most of us first startout online, we know nothing about web hosting features and choose the cheapest deal around. The problem with this is that the cheapest deal may not be the best deal and when you have a huge content website later and want to grow your website, you may find that your current web host is unable to provide the support for certain scripts.
John was one such internet business owner. He wanted to add a sql database for this new script that he was to get then the reality of the cost factor hit him. The web hosting company that he was using had only two plans and the difference in one extra website was to be $50. He later spent some time looking online for a better website host and migrated his entire network of websites to that web host. You may not be so fortunate, if your website is too large, sometimes it may be very difficult to migrate it to another web host. Thus you want to spend some time thinking about the long term growth of your website before you choose a web host.
In conclusion, choosing a web host requires some serious thinking as it can limit the growth of your internet commerce business. Hopefully the three points above have highlighted the importance of choosing a good web host and provided some examples of web hosts to avoid.
Best-web-host-directory.com is a full featured web host directory with articles and directory listings of the best web hosting and website building companies online.
Most of the people looking for products and services on the net, hunt for websites via major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Optimizing your website for higher search engine positioning is to allure mass to drive towards your website that is the likely to be your prospective buyer. To generate considerable traffic to your website it requires higher positioning in initial pages of search engines.
Here, I have given some key tips to dip you in the technical aspects available on the net to assist how to optimize your website.
The Title: Whatever text you put in the title will reviewed in the reverse bar of browser when people view the web page. So, place suitable title according to your business and products.
Meta Tags: You might be aware of Meta tags or using this on your current website. We will talk on the description tag. Description tag: Major search engines that support Meta tags will usually depict the description tag with the title in the results. Search engines many times hold entire Meta tag of the description field. The webmasters should keep in mind that that the description tags must be short to grab the attention of a user.
Keyword: You should research deeply before finalizing keywords, as it is the most important factor in website optimization.
Each keyword's weight, rate, size, status and proximity all have an effect on the ranking. You should optimize all these key factors cautiously. Examining the top ten ranking website's content and ranking factors will assist you to optimize your website. To find keywords, log on http://www.wordtracker.com and http://inventory.overture.com.
Content: The content of your website should be informative that provides people come to acknowledged about new things or be interested in. This will result revisiting of the mass at your website. Try to make your content keywords rich to drive search engines to pick up your site. Use appropriate keywords according to your business or services you offer.
Create website sitemap: Make complete site map of your website, contain all the links of main pages of your website. So the search engine robots could explore your entire website. To see example follow this link: http://www.adidas.com/in/performance/sitemap.asp
Publish articles and newsletter/press releases: Writing and publishing is one of the best ways of marketing your website on internet. It helps to generate substantial traffics to your website. You can submit articles to e-zines, article directories, web sites and magazines that offer article submissions. Don't forget to include your business information and contact address at the bottom of the article.
Article Directories ==> http://www.shvoong.com, http://goarticles.com, http://www.uniterra.com, http://www.allfreelancework.com, http://ezinearticles.com etc. Use keyword "article submission" in your search.
Press release sites ==> http://www.free-press-release.com, http://www.PRweb.com, http://www.prleap.com, http://www.pressbox.co.uk etc. Use keyword "free press release distribution" in your search. Post ads: You can place your ads on free advertising and classified ad sites, free links sites, newsgroups, which offers ads posting.
Link: The most effectual method to make your pages important for the search engine crawlers, creating links to other sites with yours. It makes your website worthwhile for the search engines. The more links at website the more significant website is considered, and will be rewarded with higher page ranks.
However, not all links are considered valuable by the search engines. The search engine will consider links more valuable if they are from sites that are having higher page ranks and also offers similar area of interest as your.
Use keyword "free link exchange" in your search.
Submit Website to search Engines: After optimizing you web site, its time to submit it to all major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc, after all for this only you have optimized your web site. There are many web-sites that provide manual free submission to almost all the main search engine. Use keyword "website submission" in your search.
Submit to the directories: Search engines and directories are different. Do not mix them. Be very careful while submitting your website to a directory. Read the directory's submission directions with full presence of mind. You can submit to directories like DMOZ and also paid directories like Yahoo. Use "web directory submission" in search.
Regular inspection of website: Once you achieve targeted page ranks and positions in search engine, don't become lousy; after all it is not forever. You should keep eye on your contenders' activities. If you are not satisfied with search engine ranking results, you should optimize your website more to attain higher search engines ranking position.
This article was created under consultation of expert SEO, who has proved his capabilities to raise page rank and position of many websites in various search engines.
This was brief description for optimizing website. Very soon I am going to publish informative series of articles on each of these key factors at http://seoservices-website-promotion.blogspot.com.
Paras Yadav:- An experinced article and website content writer. Internet marketing veteran since two years.
Go to: [http://web-content-writing.blogspot.com] or http://seoservices-website-promotion.blogspot.com.
Building a website that is both function and user friendly is no easy task. Bigger companies sometimes hire both graphic designers and developers to build their website but most little guys cannot afford that. So let's take a look at the things you should pay attention to when building and maintaining your website, especially if you cannot afford to have a team of graphic designers, developers and layout consultants working on your website.
Flash A lot of times your designer will want to get fancy and offer to design your website in flash. Although it looks great as a portfolio, in reality there are numerous problems with flash websites. First of all, flash animations (in essence that's what your website is going to be) are very large in size. Even though many people nowadays use broadband for browsing the Web, it would be unwise to dismiss a prospect who still uses dial-up and for whom it will take forever to load your website. Second of all, flash websites are not crawlable by search engine spiders, which means you loose any chance of getting free traffic from search engines.
Page Loading Time Even if you decide not to use flash, your pages still can get very large once you add a lot of text and graphics to them. If your website takes more then 8-15 seconds to load most visitors will probably leave before accessing the actual content. Later in the article we will discuss how to improve loading time by compressing the images.
Reduce the Size of Your Graphics As mentioned previously, keeping your website's pages as small as possible is very important. Reducing the size of your graphics is one way of getting pages to load faster. Talk to your developer about the way he/she is optimizing the images to make them as small as possible.
Broken Links Broken links can tremendously hurt your business image. Having broken links on your website makes you look unprofessional. Imagine your visitor looking for something on your website and once he/she finds it and clicks on the link, it doesn't work. There are plenty of tools out there that help check for broken links. If you update your website often you should check for broken links on a regular basis.
HTML Validation Validating your HTML is an important part of building a website. HTML validation services like W3C Markup Validation Service will check your pages for errors in the code and give you suggestions on how to fix them. This will eliminate any problems visitors might experience with your website.
Browser Compatibility Browser compatibility was always an issue with many websites. There are a lot of alternative browsers besides Internet Explorer including Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and Opera. Although majority of your visitors will be using Internet Explorer, you cannot afford to lose customers that are accessing your website with a different browser. Many website designs will look great in one browser but will look ridiculous in another. Talk to your developer about the ways he/she is working on making your website browser compatible.
Customer Support Easy access to customer support options and ways of contacting you are especially crucial for ecommerce businesses. If you are running a web store of any kind there is no way for your visitors to verify whether there is a legitimate company behind your site. You will need to gain their trust in order to get their business. Placing any contact information including toll-free number, live support, etc. on every page of your website is a great way of building the trust between you and your visitors.
Navigation How you design your navigation will decide whether your customers will easily be able to access all parts of your website or be lost and leave your site without finding what he/she is looking for. Make it easy for prospective buyers to find what they are looking for. Provide plenty of links on your home page, giving visitors an overview of your website's content and choices. Provide links to your home page and main sections such as order form, contact page, products, and articles on every page. Visitors may not visit your pages in the sequence you would like them to. Provide a site map (table of contents). Avoid using JavaScript drop downs or fancy flash navigation. Clearly label each section and if possible, use text links because they are small in size and are also crawlable by search engines.
Easy to Read Make sure your website is readable. An easy-to-read, professionally-designed website can maximize your sales. Dark text on a light background is easy to read. Avoid text on dark and busy backgrounds. Break up your sales copy into short sections and use subheadings to highlight benefits. Split up long pages into several pages. Use key phrases and punch lines instead of long explanations on why your service/product is better then the rest.
Spell Check Last but not least, check your spelling. No one likes to read a page filled with spelling errors. For the most part, your designer won't double check your content, especially if he/she is from a different country, so it's your responsibility.
David Cooper has been developing web sites since early 1999. Currently he runs http://www.Spaiz.net - web design company [http://wwww.spaiz.net] and working on a new Content Management System at http://www.azureSites.com
A question I am asked everyday is "Do I need to have my own website built or can I use a pre-made one? " Good question. Most people who ask this question are looking at shopping malls, affiliate programs, network marketing, or business opportunities to make money whereby the company gives them a website already built with the bells and whistles. My experience has taught me that having your own website built is the right way to go. I know, it costs a little more money but it is well worth it. Let me explain why.
Let's say you have joined a network marketing company and as a part of signing up you get this gorgeous website that supposedly does all of the selling for you. On the surface it seems this is going to be the gateway to your fortune on the internet. But most of the time, ready-made websites are just that: one big canned ad. They can provide some information to the prospective person looking at your company but they have far too many limitations.
Let me give you an example. Nearly 70,000 people searched for the term "Network Marketing" last month. Wow! That's a lot of eyeballs looking for information on network marketing. So you of course know you have the best company and products or services. And you want to get in front of those 140,000 eyeballs on the internet. Visions of success are dancing in your head but how do you drive this traffic to your ready-made website? A cloned website is an eye soar to the search engines.
The issue I see with ready-made websites is that driving traffic to it will be nearly impossible. Why? Well, search engines love sites that are constantly updating or adding new information. To the robots this means your site is worth visiting. You are a mover and a shaker, and building an informative website that they want to list. I am constantly adding or updating information on my website daily. Why? Because I get crawled often. I want the search engines to continue to know that my site is valuable.
Here's another inherent problem with ready-made websites. Let's say that you and 5 other of your teammates are lucky enough to get in the top 5 positions in Google. Most people will click on a few sites. They will see that all of your websites are clones or duplicates. One doesn't provide more or better information than the other. So what happens? People will generally let their fingers do the walking and keep searching for the website that provides them with the real meaty information they are seeking. Remember people who come to the internet are looking for the website that has the most information about the topic they are searching. It sounds so obvious but people often forget this basic building block of a successful website.
Another scenario is that let's say you had a dynamite rep you brought into your downline. And you wanted to tell the World about what this individual has done in the short time he or she has been in this business. That would be a great marketing tool for you. You could maybe even have a written and streaming video testimonial. But you can't do that in most ready-made sites. It is static and in my opinion, a dead website.
Let's use a whole different ready-made website scenario. Let's say you have a shopping mall. You paid $99 and they have set up a pretty mall for you on a cloned website. The concept looks great that you could have your own Mall for a mere $99. They have set up all of the products, shopping cart and done of all what appears to be the hard work. But again, how do you drive traffic to your website? Not to sound like a broken record but people come to the web looking for information. They come to shop because they believe you have more information about your products and will provide a good buying experience for them. It would be important for you to have tips and ideas and testimonials on your website but you can't. And people can tell when your website looks like it was stamped out.
Another important variable that you need to look at is getting your visitors names and email addresses. If your company website did not come with an opt-in way for you to capture this important information, you have lost a valuable means of communicating with people.
So, to review, the biggest obstacles I see in having a ready-made website are:
1. Can't add or change content
2. They have a canned appearance that turns visitors off
3. No opportunity for growth or expansion
4. Can't place your own articles, ideas, tips or information
5. Can't offer anything new
6. Can't capture their name and email address
Now is all lost if you have a ready-made website? Here are some solutions to still driving traffic to your website.
First, you can use pay per click advertising through Yahoo or Google. But be prepared to pay top dollar to be in the number 1 position. However, you will really want to take a look at what keywords to bid on and how much. This is important so you get the biggest bang for your buck and is an art form all by itself.
Second, I would suggest that you create your own website. You could have lots of information there and then redirect them to your ready-made website for ordering, or company video or program details. This way you have taken a step further than your next closest competitor and provided real information to your visitors. Of course, it would be wise to check with the company who provided you with the ready-made website to make sure this fits within their guidelines of operation. Better to be safe than sorry.
Third, you can be very proactive and write articles on your subject matter and send them off to magazines or e-zines. You will obviously put your website address in the resource box at the end of your article. So if you have information to share, get it out there and point them to your website for more.
So all is not lost but I would give thought to these marketing strategies and be more creative than the next guy. And if you have yet to start an online business, I would look at having a website built. As you grow your business, you will be able to grow your website.
Jan Peterson founder of http://www.goldstarreview.com researches and reviews business opportunities including internet marketing, real estate investing, affiliate marketing, financial investing and more. Over 400 FREE reports available.
Creating a well-designed website is the first step in your internet marketing strategy that must be backed up with techniques designed to drive traffic to the website for successful, long-term results. You wouldn't consider opening a retail store in a major shopping mall without signage and you shouldn't consider having a nice looking website designed without expanding your web presence in order to be found on the internet. The following strategy overview is designed to bring about these results:
This search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is composed of several processes in three stages.
Tier I
Website design is the foundation and beginning of a successful internet marketing strategy. It is true that several websites exist on the internet that are unattractive but seem to work. If there are aspects of these websites that work, imagine how well they could do if they simply followed basic design implementation tactics that resulted in a good image as well as simply pushed information out to the viewer. These basics are essential for Tier 1 success:
Once the website has been created and published, many new website owners think that the project is finished. But in reality, the real work is just beginning. In order to create a money-making site, traffic must be generated and driven to the website. There are several effective methods that can be implemented in Tier II for this to occur. While all methods may not be required to see successful traffic generation, some combination of most if not all will probably be needed to create traffic, maintain traffic and finally, grow traffic to our website with long-term results. Consider implementing these strategies:
Some combination of price and number of clicks will result from a well-designed and constantly monitored campaign. The important result to watch is the conversion rate. How many paid clicks convert into the desired result; i.e., new contract, sale of product, sign up for e-newsletter, etc.
Finally, after the hard-core efforts that are directly related to generating traffic to your website, you will want to create follow-on, additional traffic that is under your control. Several methods exist for this strategy:
In order to determine if the SEO efforts are successful, you must monitor results of backlinks, PR and web trend statistics. There are many sources for generating this data as well as programs that will assist in these analyses. Whatever method you choose, whether it is using specific programs or setting up a spreadsheet for entry of data, be consistent in tracking the data. There will be fluctuations from day-to- day. You are looking for general, overall upward trends. Upward progress followed by maintenance of a strong position with slow, steady growth would indicate a successful SEO campaign.
Article written and copyrighted by Chesa Keane, TAO Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Chesa Keane of TAO Consultants has been involved with the internet for 10 years through internet consulting, web development and search engine optimization. Go to http://www.computergoddess.com for a free Search Engine Optimization Checklist.
