This article is for business owners who are brand new to internet marketing who would like to start marketing their websites in earnest in the New Year.
Perhaps in 2012 you intended to jump into the online marketing pond, but for one reason or another you didn?t undertake things as passionately as you wanted. Maybe you started doing research on the different options for online marketing, but soon felt out of your depth.
I know it can be confusing, especially if you?ve never marketed a website on the internet before. If you feel that way, know that you?re completely normal. It seems like there is a never ending sea of knowledge about SEO and internet marketing, much of it contradictory and changing regularly.
If this is you, I want to help you get a better grip on understanding what is going on when you market your website online and some very user friendly ways to get started. We?ll take a few posts to cover all this information. First let?s start with the bare basics?
Why do you need to market your website?
You might have assumed that creating a website would be the full extent of your online marketing. It?s often portrayed that way?you hear people saying ?set up a website for your business so that you can be found online?.
Actually creating a website is just the first step. It?s rather like opening a brick and mortar store in a remote part of town. People may be interested in what you?re selling and willing to travel to your shop, but unless you market your shop and let people know where it is and what it?s about, you won?t get those customers coming in.
You need to market your website just like you would market a brick and mortar business. Your intention is to ?spread the word? about what your website is about.
Where do your website visitors come from?
They can come from a few places:
1 ? One obvious place is from personal referrals. Maybe you have business cards or perhaps you?ve told people about your website. Being familiar with your business already, they go to your website address to see your site.
This is one of the more minor forms of traffic on the internet, but it?s often the only one that people with offline businesses are aware of.
It is nice to have a website where you can verbally tell people to go to read more about your business, but by and large your website will serve the purpose of attracting people who have never met you and don?t know your business exists.
2 ? Traffic from links on other web pages leading to your website.
Now that you have a website address, you can create links going to your site. A ?link? is basically a form of ?transportation? from one location on the internet to another.
Links play a crucial role on the internet in marketing your website. In marketing your website, you find a way to interact with other people and communities on the internet, and your ?calling card? that lets people know that you were there and how to reach you is provided in the form of a link to your website.
Other website owners can also provide a link to a page on your website to direct their readers to useful or entertaining information there. For example, perhaps they?re writing a blog post on a topic that you also wrote about on your website, and they give a link to one of your web pages so that their readers can go there to find more information on that topic. Or perhaps they were inspired by one of the ideas from your blog and they want to credit you with a link. There are all sorts of reasons why another website owner would link to a web page on your site.
Search engines such as Google also use links as one factor in helping to determine the subject matter and authority of your website, which helps the search engine to properly rank the pages of your website in its search results listings.
For more in depth information on what a link is, please click on these links to two other resources I have on this topic:
What Are Links And How Do You Get Them?
What Can The Movie ?Cast Away? Teach You About Link Building?
What other web pages would be linking to your site?
Links from other pages on the internet can be in the form of free reprint articles (these are the articles that you create when you do article marketing), social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc), forums, genuine blog comments, other website owners linking to your site, and so on.
All of these avenues offer the opportunity to link back to the various pages of your website, and when people read your articles, or look at your (or another person?s) Facebook or Twitter page, or see an answer or question you?ve listed on a forum, or read one of your thoughtful comments on someone else?s blog post, or see your website mentioned on someone?s blog, they can also click a link leading back to your website.
3- Search traffic, such as traffic received from Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
Forget about your website for a second?put yourself in the shoes of someone who needs to find something on the internet. The first thing you do is go to a search engine, such as Google. You type in what you?re looking for and execute the search. Google responds by giving you a list of results comprised of various web pages.
Google also has the web pages arranged in a particular order, with the ones most likely to satisfy your need listed at the top.
If your website is listed high in the results list for a query having to do with your niche, you will start getting visitors referred to you from the search engines.
Keeping in mind how many people on the planet ?google? things, you can imagine the volume of potential traffic that could be yours if your website ranked high in a search engine?s results lists. Search traffic offers the most significant traffic potential by far of all the different ways for website visitors to find out about your site.
This is just an introductory lesson on what it means to market your website on the internet. Next time we?ll get more specific, and I?ll answer some common questions that newbies have about doing online marketing.
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