Attracting Visitors

How are you going to attract your target audience to your website?

Community and Industry Listings

There are thousands of directories related to every industry. Do a search on Google for your business category and add the term "directory". Listing your company with a directory has the dual benefit of driving targeted traffic to your site and improving your search engine ranking. Most valuable for many websites are directory listings which pertain to a particular geographic area or specific community.

Two good places to start:

While we encourage our clients to list themselves on multiple directories, many directories have associated fees. Some, like Yahoo are well established and often worth the expense. However, many directories are not popular enough to justify their cost. We recommend sticking to free directories and saving your advertising budget for something else. If you do choose to pay for directory listings, we advise only using directories with a one time fee and not an annual or reoccurring fee.

Search Engine Optimization

Given that there are a variety of subtle differences between the many different search engines, we will focus on how google ranks websites. While many "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) companies pride themselves on developing techniques and technologies to improve their clients search engine rankings, outside of the dirty tricks department there are three basic ways to optimize websites.

Essentially, links from other sites mean more to your search engine ranking than anything else. So much so that with the right sites linking to you, you could ignore your meta tags and page content and still end up first in your desired searches.

I don't want to get too technical here, but it is also a good idea to have a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml file. The robots.txt file tells search engines what pages/files to index and what to ignore while the sitemap.xml file helps search engines understand the way you intended the links on your website to be viewed.

Two last tips:

Reciprocal Links

As with directory listings, links to your site have the dual benefit of driving targeted traffic to your site and improving your search engine ranking. If you have a couple websites, then link them all together. Link your pages together too. If your friends, partners and associates have websites, link to them in exchange for them linking to you. If there are any particularly desirable sites you would like to have a link to your site on, contact them and see if you can work something out. Small business owners know that nothing promotes their business quite as well as word of mouth recommendations. Reciprocal links with associated businesses are the internet equivalent.

Internet Advertising

Many diverse forms of internet advertising are available. There are books written just on using Google's AdWords. Essentially, one has a banner, side bar or text add for your site placed on other websites. You then pay for either the number of times your adds are viewed, the number of times someone clicks on the add or some complex metric somewhere in between. If you have money to invest, Internet Advertising is a good way of converting your advertising budget into website traffic. Let's look at two options:

Google AdWords is a useful tool to have at least some familiarity with. It costs $5 to set up an account, but after that, you set your budget. The cost per click ranges depending on the biding competition over your desired keywords. For obscure keywords the cost per click is around .04-.20 cents, but for popular keywords advertisers pay as much as $2.50 per click. A secondary benefit of having a google Adwords account is that google provides some excellent statistics (with great looking charts) on visits to your site and the popularity of keywords.

If you have a niche and can find a good match on Blogads.com, give it some serious consideration. Take some time to look at any potential blog. What other advertising do they have? How frequently do they post? What sort of comments do their readers make? If you think you have a match, give it a try.

Consider the cost of an ad relative to the number of visits to your site it generates, but also consider whether those visits "convert" into clients, customers or community members.

Affiliate Sales

Discussed on the "Fruit" page as a way of generating revenue, for the shopsite owner there are cheep or even free affiliate sales applications which allow you to run your own affiliate sales campaigns. This means that you can enlist other websites to advertise your online store. In return, when someone clicks through to your shopsite and makes a purchase, the affiliate who drove them to your site gets a commission.

Blogging

Due to their enormous popularity, blogs have become technologically very advanced. As early adaptors of social bookmarking, RSS and an ever expanding multitude of community generating features, running a blog is a great way to connect with the "Web 2.0" community. It also provides the opportunity to create your own search engine searchable website content, without the help of a web designer. Just log in and write. The "talkbacks" feature makes bloging about other blogs a great way of attracting their attention. If you are a subject matter expert or industry veteran, you may find yourself generating more revenue from adds you host on your blog than from your business. But don't count on it. There are more blogs than stars in the sky...

Press Release

Putting together press release packages may not apply to every business, but I have seen companies drive their web traffic through the roof by having a local newspaper turn a press release into a story.

Traditional Marketing

Consider advertising with Newspapers, Radio, Television etc. Don't forget to include your websites domain name on your business cards! Consider sponsoring local events to gain promotional opportunities.

One of the great uses of a website is to act as marketing collateral. When a person is interested by your radio, TV or print add, your website provides an opportunity for them to find out more about your products and services.

Viral Marketing

Openendedly referring to any advertising that duplicates and distributes itself, the internet lends itself very well to viral marketing. For people to duplicate and distribute an ad, the ad has to provide something educational, entertaining or meaningful, usually without requiring any fiscal commitment. Though this medium can take many forms we will look at two common ways viral marketing could work for you.

Many successful viral marketing campaigns use little more promotion than the URL of a website at the end of an animation or video. Consider that the content of the add may have little to do with the products or services offered. For instance, a video about a heroic plumber who rescues a family from an alligator in the sewer, does not need to list the services and prices of a plumbing company in order to be an effective viral marketing add. In fact, the success of a viral marketing add usually requires that there be little or no overt commercial content.

Email Lists/ Contact Forms

Once the initial contact has been made with clients, customers and communities, retaining their profile data and contact information, with which to notify them of events, specials and routine service reminders, is a valuable way of building community or customer loyalty. While varying forms of Customer Relations Management (CRM) programs, techniques and even web applications exist, below the enterprise level most CRM can be handled by a contact form on your website and an email list.

Social & Business Networking Sites

Social and Business Networking is an extremely broad category, though networking sites have certain common characteristics. They showcase profiles created by visitors to their website who become active participants in their community. They get their website content from the profiles users create and generate revenue from advertising. They provide users with an opportunity to engage with the community and a variety of tools with which to do so. Here are examples of two social and business networking sites:

The somewhat crass "Singles" advertising on MySpace and the initial popularity among college students has left them with a rather bawdy reputation, however access to the classifieds and the potential to network through a topical group may justify the 10min it takes to create an account. If you know a little html, it is easy enough to add to your profile a prominent link to your own website. If you can find or create your niche, MySpace can be well worth the time. Keep in mind though, there are thousands of other social networking sites. Consider having profiles on many, all with links to your website...

Alibaba is, like MySpace, a juggernaut. Many companies exist through revenue generated by Alibaba sales. If you are involved with buying or selling of any variety of goods, Alibaba is an asset worth exploring. Having a profile is free and takes about 5min to set up. Again, there are many alternatives. With about 50billion US dollars being exchanged through eBay auctions a year, they are also clearly an avenue for buyers and sellers to consider. But Alibaba fills more of a niche, for anyone running a store or selling wholesale.

Forums

Among the millions of online forums there are most likely ones where your target audience is vibrantly conversing. Consider creating a profile on such a forum and then sharing some of your expertise by posting new topics or replying to threads. Your ability to write with authority will improve your reputation while every link back to your own website will generate visits. Consider having a forum (or blog) on your own website, where you can act as an expert available to answer community questions. Through the forum you'll have the opportunity to notify the community of specials or events, get feedback and testimonials on your products and services and attract visitors to your site.

Identity 2.0

If this sounds like web talk hocus pocus, that's OK. I usually reserve such discussions for the "Immanent Future" category of the Sun Powered Productions blog, but in the last few months Identity 2.0 technology has begun to be supported by many major web applications. In the near future (say 2-5 years), the myriad of on line profiles we have for every shopsite, blog, forum or community site we belong to will be consolidated into a single profile that we will own and manage. When we visit a website our Identity 2.0 profile automatically handles all our payment, profile and other preferences. So, no more writing in your payment info or searching for lost passwords. Scary? Maybe, but it's definitely happening. Something to consider in 2007 is whether you want your website, shopsite or blog to support Identity 2.0 technology. To find out more, take a look at openid.net or Dick Hardt's 2005 Identity 2.0 keynote speech.

How does this attract people to your website? Well, for the most part, Identity 2.0 has more to do with serving visitors once they get to your site. However, for a brief period of time, those who support Identity 2.0 will gain the attention (and admiration) of the early adapters of Identity 2.0.