A small business website may have
several purposes, but it needs traffic to accomplish any of them.
Whether your website sells products or services, gives information about
your business or contains information of interest to potential
customers, people have to be able to find your website before they can
deal with your company. Once people visit, the website has to be useful
and attractive enough to keep them there and get them to come back.
There are several techniques that can increase traffic, help you
evaluate your website and ultimately gain customers.
Pay for Traffic
A quick way to gain traffic, especially for a new website, is to pay for visitors in a pay-per-click campaign. Sites that offer this service include Google and Bing. You choose keywords that relate closely to your site and, when your listing comes up during a search and someone clicks on it to visit your site, you pay a fee for this visitor. Keywords that are unique to your site are less expensive than common keywords and the visitors they generate are more interested in your site.Publicize Your Domain
In addition to Internet-based initiatives, you have to get your website address out into the off-line world as well. A key strategy for offline publicity is to make sure your domain is prominent on all your publicity and marketing materials as well as your business card and letterhead. Your email address has to feature your domain as well. Use @yourdomain.com instead of a Gmail, Yahoo or other address. That way you publicize your domain every time you send out an email.
Promote Your Site
Actively promoting your website to gain traffic is a lot of work but one of the most effective activities. You can start by issuing a press release to your local media when you first go live and follow that up with releases to Internet news sites. Join LinkedIn, the social networking site for businesses, to gain business credibility. Writing regularly on a subject related to your business on a blog or other site and answering questions in your field promotes you as an expert and brings visitors to your site. Leaving helpful comments on sites related to your business is also very effective as long as you don't make a nuisance of yourself and don't promote your business too overtly.Social Media
Using social media to promote your site is a free way of publicizing your business. You can create a company page on Facebook and use your personal account to post messages about your business activities. Google Plus offers similar functions and allows you to group your business contacts together. Twitter is more useful once you have made a name for yourself and can accumulate enough followers to make regular tweeting worthwhile. If your business is multimedia-oriented, you can share pictures, video and music on Tumblr. Social-media promotion ensures that your contacts and potential customers are reminded regularly of what your business has to offer.Freebies
A great way to encourage visitors is to give away something for free on your website in return for registration. You have to require visitors to fill out a form with some contact information to make sure each visitor only gets one free item. Small businesses that don't have much money can give away free information in the form of articles or e-books. Inexpensive items that feature your logo or a message from your company do double duty by advertising your business after bringing in visitors.
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