It’s nice that you already have a website for your business. You are happy because you love its flashy design. However, animations have their own pros and cons. The advantage is that it adds to the great looks of your website. The disadvantage is that not all browsers support flash animations. Hence, not all internet users will have the chance to see your beautiful presentations in the homepage of your website. Furthermore, too much animation, graphics and banners do not help your website look corporate and professional, unless you are in the industry of animation and design. Design is important like the design of your store or office. However, it must also be built with comfort and ease of use. More importantly, it must achieve its purpose – to reach people. A well designed company website is futile if you and your few close friends are the only persons who know and visit it. To attract more visitors and potential customers, the following are techniques you can do to make it happen:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When people want to find information (products, services, etc.,) on the Internet, they go to search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. If your website pages are indexed and ranked higher on these search engines, your web pages will receive more visitors. For example, if a certain person is planning to have a vacation in Tacloban City, Philippines, and he wants to search for the best hotels in that area, he will probably look over Google’s search engine and search for the keyword “hotels in Tacloban City Philippines”. Here, SEO does its job. If you’re a hotel owner in Tacloban City and your search engine optimized website ranks higher in the Google search result pages, your hotel will be the first thing to come on the researcher’s knowledge.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the natural or organic search results. This process involves optimizing and targeting your page titles, descriptions, text contents, images, videos, tags and keywords. It also includes increasing your page rank and popularity through link building and publishing regular, fresh and unique contents. To promote your website to potential customers, you need to target relevant keywords in your contents, as well as link to relevant websites. More importantly, you need to create pieces of information (articles, news, blog posts, stories, etc.,) that are useful to your website’s readers and users.
Social Media Optimization (SMO)
We are already in the social media era, as claimed by many social media evangelists. With the rise of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, this claim cannot be denied. Most of the people who use Internet spend most of their time in Facebook. They even spend more time in this social media than in Google. Facebook did not only conquer the world, but also every part of it (I’m talking about localization). Thus, if your business or company offers products and services to local customers, Facebook can be your effective medium of marketing and promotion. If you have more friends or followers, you can promote your business to more people. You can also target potential customers by selecting only your targeted markets, such as by location or by people’s age and gender. However, you must also keep in mind that social media requires real social activities, such as making real relationship (friendship), respecting people and helping them. Hence, spamming and invading other private lives are not recommended in social media promotion.
Offline Promotion
Although online marketing is cool, offline marketing still play a great important role in promoting your business, products or services to potential customers. Internet marketing only minimize your cost of offline marketing, but it does not mean you can already ignore promoting your business, and even your website outside the Internet. There are many effective ways to endorse your website offline. You can even do most of them without spending lots of dime. The following are offline ways to promote your website to potential customers:
- Placing your website in your business cards, letterheads and other communication materials.
- Exchanging business cards with your friends and associates.
- Joining clubs and organizations to expand your network.
- Giving giveaways or souvenirs, such as t-shirts, key chains and other cheap stuff which you can put your website name and address.
- Put useful stickers (no-smoking, keep this place clean, etc.,) in public places. Don’t forget to ask for permission.
- Making a contest to promote your website.
- Making your vehicle a moving advertisement by putting your www.yourcompany.com on it.
- Branding your laptops, bags and other personal or professional things with your website.
- Distribute information-rich flyers and catalogues that refer to your website.
- Conducting seminars to orient audience about your website (make sure to conduct topics that are relevant to your business and at the same time useful to your audience).
- Tell your old friends and schoolmates.
- Sponsor a sports team
- Talk about your website to everyone whom you meet.
- and just help and help more people.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still an effective way to promote your business or website online. But I’m not talking about buying a mailing list; I’m talking about building a list of loyal subscribers. This is still part of your feat to help people by providing them with information in the form of newsletters that are useful to them. This means that you should create information, such as articles, news and stories that help improve your subscribers and readers’ lives. You can do this by setting up a professional subscription widget in your website that let your readers subscribe their emails to receive relevant newsletters from your website. You can try a free auto responder service from Google’s Feedburner or a premium service from Aweber. If your website is new and is not reached by numbers of visitors who will subscribe to your website, you can try to conduct a contest or give freebies, such as free eBook or free reports to attract subscribers. But always remember that your responsibility doesn’t end when you get their emails; it continues to providing them with the contents that are useful and helpful to your subscribers. When they are satisfied, they will likely become loyal to your website and in your business.
Word of Mouth or Mouse Marketing
Marketing does not start at promotion. It starts from the time you produce your products. When it comes to marketing of your website, it starts from the time you design and create web contents. This means that you should make your website promotable. This is because even though your website is visited by many people if it doesn’t have a user-friendly design and useful contents on it, your visitors will not mind to return to your website. Word of mouth (offline) or word of mouse (online) is a very effective user-oriented marketing technique you can do to achieve lasting success. This process happens when certain people experience quality and satisfaction on certain products, services or website contents, and then spread the good news to other people. This is also called viral marketing, where you make your users or customers your effective marketers. The formula here is simply to provide your website users, customers and clients with quality and guaranteed satisfaction.
I hope you have obtained useful ideas and insights that you can use to promote your website to your potential customers. Just keep in mind and in heart to always have the intention to help people. This is because when you help people, you are also helping yourself, as well as your business. Finally, make sure that you don’t only target potential customers to increase your profit, but also target what you are really into – that is to really serve people.
