|
Getting People to Your Web Site
Let me be controversial –
I bet,
that the majority of you reading this article have a
website that is not giving you the results you want!!!
The internet is not the proverbial mousetrap – just
because you have a web site does not mean that the people
are going to flock there by the thousands. It also does
not mean that you have to spend millions of dollars (
like the AMP’s etc during the Games) on advertising.
It does mean having the smarts - you have to think and
work differently smart.
Before you get people to your
web site there is some planning you need
to do...
The first question to ask
yourself is:
"What is the business
purpose of my site?".
Even if you have an
established site, ask the question.
I have had many clients come to
me who have built sites that just never worked for them.
Almost always the reason is that they had no strategic purpose underpinning the
establishment of the web site. To be successful, You
need to have a clear understanding of your website’s
purpose.
Then you need to clearly define:
Traditional marketing concepts apply
and I will not go into this in any detail (if you want t
know more about basic marketing get any good book on the
subject).
So – how do you get them there ( assuming you have
done all the good planning and market research etc)?
Putting Your WWW on Everything
Is your website address boldly marked on everything
you currently send out to customers or give away?
Invoices, packaging, Business cards, trade displays,
company vehicles...
I have met so many people with a
company website and there’s no web or email address on
their business cards – amazing but true.
Put in place an
action plan today to put your web site address on every
piece of correspondence that your business produces.
There is a Simple rule -
If it can be seen and should be seen -
use it!
Give people a reason to visit the site, a catchy
slogan, information, a competition. It should be almost
as visible and large as your brand or company name. Dare
to be different here - a timid heart never won fair
customer! – but not crass.
Dick Smith has the
ability to get the public and the media behind him and
at very little cost. Simply because he is prepared to
speak passionately about his business.
One Australian company decided to
hire a number of students to walk around a trade
conference, where they had a display stand, dressed in
costume and carrying a placard showing only the company
website dot com address – this aroused some curious
interest I can tell you. The same company did this at the
airport when the majority of conference attendee’s
arrived off their flights. Nothing but the website
address – everyone remembers a dot com address these
days.
Of course the
novelty of the dot com address will wear of as some of
our US colleagues will attest to, but while it works let your hair down and exploit the conventional customer
exposure areas. I am sure that if you sat back and
thought about it you would find any number of ways to
get your site into lights.
Some
New Internet Based Marketing Tools
The Internet is
truly a global marketplace, so how do you reach it? Now we get into some of the more
challenging and interesting areas of internet marketing.
You all know the old Real Estate adage
"Position Position Position" Well
that applies to your website
as well!!!
Introduction to Internet Search Engines and
Search Directories.
On the
web, your new customers will generally come from Search
Engines or Directories. Approximately 85% of Internet
users find what they are looking for in this way.
Most of you will appreciate the importance of
Search Engines (SE's) and Search Directories (SD's),
but a brief review will help with understanding the rest
of this article.
Search Engines are the Internet/web tools that people
use to go across the world wide web and find sources of
information. Common SE’s are AltaVista, Google, AOL,
HotBot and in Australia we have Anzwers, Wombat, Excite,
GOeureka etc.
How
do I get listed in these search engines? click here
Search Engine’s use a computer program
(called a Spider) to look across the world for the subject/information
being searched on by the user. These "spiders"
crawl across websites and determine, mathematically, how
"important" a site is to the person looking
for the information. The Search Engine then sends back a list of
sources of information for the viewer to visit. These
sources are ranked and displayed in order of relevance according to its definition.
(this is based on mathematical algorithms)
This ranking is critically
important.
Research shows that most people do not look
beyond the first thirty rankings.
This means that if your site is ranked in the first
ten or so returns you stand a good chance of getting
visitors to your website. I expand on this and explain how
this is achieved in further articles.
Search
Directories differ from
Search Engine’s in that a human will visit
your site and make an assessment of it. No computers and
no "spidering". The worlds biggest and most
important Search Directory is Yahoo. Good positioning on Yahoo means
Gold Gold Gold. There are a number of Search Directories around, the
Open Directory Project (ODP) and Look Smart are gaining in importance all
the time, but Yahoo is still the biggest and best.
How
do I get listed in these Search Directories?
There
are about eighteen or so key international Search Engines
and Search Directories. Here is some info on their
popularity click
here
Back to our Position Position Position. It is
important to get a high ranking on the Search Engine’s and
Search Directories.
" …But my market is in Brisbane or Twin
Towers!" I hear you say.
"Think Local – Work Global" is the
approach. If the local market is your catchment area,
unless you have a lot of money to spend on local media
to pull visitors to your site, you will still need
to get high rankings.
Of course there
are many other tools that will get visitors to your web
site and some that will help your search engine rankings
as well...
So stayed tuned
for the next article....you can get a notifying email to
tell you when it is available by subscribing to Internet
Business Success. Subscribe
here
Go
on to "They all came but nobody was home" part 2
in this series
|
The
Basics of Making Your Web Site Perform
