Website marketing:

The most important aspect of promoting your products online is to get visitors into your site. Many people build an online presence by designing a website hoping that the website alone will promote sales. However, both website marketing and online promotion are required to drive quality traffic to your website. Basic marketing online should include: 1) Develop strong content. 2) Use high rankings in the search engines to promote your website. Just having your website listed in the search engines isn’t enough. Your website should be found in the top 1-30 positions per key word applicable to your website. 3) Improve your website link popularity. If your website already is listed in the search engines, is properly optimized and yet still isn’t consistently listed in the search engines, consider improving your link popularity. Link popularity is the number of links which point into your website from other sites online. Ideally, these external links (or links from other websites) should be of a similar theme/subject/industry to your website. Keep in mind that link popularity is more about the quality of links than the quantity of links. 4) Gain exposure about your website through effective publicity and public relations. Publicity begins with a well-written press release. A press release should resemble the following: After you’ve written your press release, submit it to the press release announcement services. 5) Develop a newsletter to keep your business name and products/services in front of your customers as well as keep them coming back to your site. 6) Create great ads and test them for effectiveness. 7) Place ads in other online newsletters or e-zines which reach your target audience. 8) Become an expert in your field by: a) Creating articles related to your website’s topic/subject/theme. i. Submit them to e-zines which reach your target audience. Be sure that the e-zines allow article submission. ii. Submit them to e-zines content directories. A listing of content directories can be found in the Resources section of this document. b) Participating in newsgroups and blogs which are relevant to your field. Remember, that the goal here is to be the voice of knowledge, not to aggressively pitch your product/service. c) Developing white papers or short, free e-Books to showcase your expertise. Offer only information which will be helpful to your audience. List these in as many e-Book directories as possible. Be sure to include your business information and site URL at the end of each article and insist that this biographical data be run with each article that is published. 9) Get listed in industry/subject directories. 10) Improve your word-of-mouth advertising.