There are hundreds of millions of websites out in the wild. How in the world can customers find your website. And even if they do, will they stay to look around? In order to be found online, you need to advertise. There are many ways to advertise but having the right advertising strategies will save you time and money while driving traffic to your website.
The first step is to create a detailed plan for how you will reach your target audience. It may seem obvious, but you need to identify every type of business and even people who might be interested in your product and/or service. Let’s take boating equipment for example. With gas prices as high as they are, this may appear as a bad example to some readers. However, I believe that those who can find the right advertising strategies in bad times tend to persevere.
So you sell boating equipment. Know that there are several communities of boat owners and devoted water sport types out there. You may want to target fishermen – in both the commercial and the sportsman categories. You may also want to try targettng scuba divers and so on. There are a lot of niche markets with potential customers within each segment. Make a list of all the types of organizations, groups and even individuals who may be buyers of your product or service. Think of parallel, adjacent, and complementary markets.
In developing your advertising strategies, you must also consider the way search engines work. The world wide web would be one chaotic place if it weren’t for search engines. So learn how they work. Learn a little about how search engines index and the time that they take to pick up your site. Granted, this is a complex topic. If your business can afford it, you may want to hire an SEO expert. This is one advertising strategy investment that really pays for itself.
If you can’t make that type of investment right now, you can make use of many free advertising methods. They do take an investment in your time though. Back to our boating equipment website example, try writing 15 to 30 informative articles on your product or service. Make the articles of the “how-to” type. Readers like this type of articles. Submit your articles to online directories like ezinearticles.com or ideamarketers.com or amazines.com. Include an author resource box with a keyword anchored link back to your website.
You probably know that high quality content and back links to your website imporve your search engine rankings. You want to consistently develop as much content and links as you can get. Content translate to the search engines as “food.” So feed them well.
The more links (preferable one way links) you have, the better off your website will be in terms of traffic. People and search engine spiders follow the links. Keep building.
If you don’t have an online newsletter, create one as part of your advertising strategy. Look at it as free advertising. Create or buy some feature pieces of content and do the research to fill-in the rest of your contents with interesting and useful tidbits, freebies, and advice.
Finally, remember that a good advertising strategy involves giving away something for free. Give a way a free ebook or report when they subscribe to your online newsletter. The freebie acts as an incentive for people to enter their name and email address.
All the above strategies work. They just need to be applied and maintained on a consistent basis.
