Market Your Web Site 101

Market Your Web Site 101

Lesson #1
by Charles E. Brown

Opportunity:

The Web provides a great vehicle for low budget and even the free promotion of projects, commercial ventures and even "self". You already knew this, I'm sure, but the Web changes every moment and here are some up-to-the-minute tips on Web marketing and promotion.

Although most of you may have Web sites/pages that market you and/or your work, the question is are they getting traffic? If the answer is yes, are you monitoring the traffic? Do you actually get to communicate with your traffic? Does your traffic return? One all-important question is, does your traffic grow?

Point 1:

Before you can get the most out of your Web presence you ABSOLUTELY MUST have some way of tracking your visitors. There are many free site statistic-tracking utilities. There are also some excellent "pay-for-service" site statistics tools as well. You should visit you favorite search engine and get a good free or pay for service site statistics utility.

It's not enough to just have a "counter" look for features like:

>Highest monthly page views
(Let's you know which pages on your site are hot or cold)

>Most popular browser visitors use
(Lets you know which browser visitors use the most, good info for deciding how to design your pages, various browsers display content in different ways)

>Most common screen resolution visitors have
(Also useful for designing pages, different sizes of graphics and text fonts will display differently on various monitor sizes)

>This page is linked to most often from this URL
(Lets you know which hyperlinks are being used to get traffic to your site/page)

>Referrer
(Traffic for one page may have entered through another page on your site, knowing this, you may decide to heavily promote a page that has high referrer stats)

Point 2:

Get a Web site chat software utility for your site. These tools are GREAT, they allow you to chat with the people who visit your site. Basically, you place a button on your Web site that lets traffic know that "live chat" with the site owner or representative is available. You also insert a "code" into each page that you want chat enabled on. Both the button and the chat code are given to you by the service providing the chat utility. Many of these services are free, and there are others that are "pay-for-service" (the free ones work great).

By using these utilities on your site, you can talk to visitors, view their stats, see where they came in from, and see which pages they view while at your site. There is a great deal of useful information you can get from the software.

Lets suppose that a visitor was not all that interested in buying your goods and services or subscribing to your ezine (whatever the case may be), if they choose to chat with you live, you may convince them otherwise! You could invite them to bring back friends and share links, tips and exchange other useful information. You could inform them of your next sale, special or another commercial venture on the horizon. The possibilities are boundless!

Point 3:

Don't rely on just your goods and services to be the reason your traffic comes to visit. Do some research on hot topics in various categories (recent news, community concerns, consumer issues, arts and others). You can learn what topics are hot by visiting news Web sites like CNN, MSNBC and others. You can also visit community and consumer sites like iVillage and BlackPlanet.

Write articles that inform visitors about these hot topics and post them to Web pages designed specifically for the subject. Add links to the latest news articles and place photos (royalty free) on the page to spice things up. Don't spend too much time generating the pages, you need to strike while the info is hot!

Point 4:

Some search engines have special advertisement programs that allow you to run small ads on their search results pages. The price of these ads depends on which "key words" you choose. The key words activate the display of your advertisement on the search results pages.

The Search engine developing co. rates the cost of the key words by the popularity of the search key words and phrases on their search engine. More commonly used key words like (shop, buy, book, music, art) and others quite naturally cost a bundle! However, key words like (sshopp, bbuyy, boook, muuzik, aarrt) and other miss-spelled words might be dirt cheap, and yes, even FREE.

Google has an "Adwords" campaign that allows you to do this. It should be noted that even the FREE key words will end up costing you something. However, you may get your ad displayed hundreds of times before you spend even one dollar! That's fantastic, and if you're really clever with it you may get hundreds of ad displays for FREE.

How is this possible, why would miss-spelled words get search results? And furthermore, why would my ad show up? Its simple, you've done it before, we all have, you've keyed in the wrong characters into a search engine, it's called a type-o! We make them all the time and so does everyone else that is surgically attached to a keyboard. If you key in "sshop" which has one too many (s)s, you will get the closest matches.
If you purchased that key word, this means an ad that you made and saved to the search engines hosts sever will be displayed on the side of the search results page. Whatever price you paid for that keyword will be charged to your account with the search engine host. If the price was $0, then you got an ad displayed for FREE.

Most likely this will cost you something even if the words you purchase showed up as FREE, However, if you pick your key words and search phrases carefully, its not uncommon to get 200-500 ad displays for under $5.

Remember, Anyone who visits your site based on clicking a displayed ad is TARGETED TRAFFIC. They did not get there by misleading spam email or FFA links. If you chose your key words as being type-Os that are a few letters off from your site/page topic, then most likely, the visitor is looking for information your site facilitates. Therefore when they see your ad and click on it, your site should be 99.9% in agreement with what they are looking for. Marketing agents can tell you, this means that they are far more likely to stay at your site, return to your site, and buy your sites goods and services.

All Together Now:

Let's look at the use of all of the aforementioned strategies together. I recently wrote an article about Microsoft Smart Tags. This subject is very controversial among Web designers/developers, Web site admin., and computer software companies. I am immersed in the Web design genre therefore it was not necessary for me to use news sites to discover this hot topic. However, I could have just as easily used CNN, MSNBC, and many other news and consumer issue sites to read about this topic. They all had major coverage of the technology.

I wrote an article about the subject, posted the article to a Web page, added links to news stories on major news sites and even added links to the Microsoft Web page devoted to explaining/defining Smart Tag technology. In addition I countered Microsoft's points with info from major opponents of the technology to round my page and make it appealing to both views.

I created an ad for the page and placed it on Google using their Adwords campaign. I chose Type-0 key words that where free or dirt-cheap and very close to matching key words related to the subject.
Next, I logged into my site chat utility and waited for traffic. Eventually, traffic came in, occasionally; some of the visitors used the chat utility to communicate with me. I was able to convince a few of the visitors to visit my other page where I promote my ebooks. Although nobody made a purchase, it was the opportunity that I treasured most.

I later used my site statistics utility to see where the bulk of the traffic to my ebook pages was coming from. It turned out that most of the traffic from that day had come from the Microsoft Smart Tags article that I had just put up, and 100% of that traffic came directly from Google! This educated me to the fact that it would be a wise investment of my time to put MORE TIME and effort into turning this targeted traffic into customers.

Class is out for today!

Charles E. Brown
http://www.productsservicesideas.com/
http://www.productsservicesideas.com/shopping.html
http://www.productsservicesideas.com/complaining.html

Author	Charles E. Brown
Company	EWM / PSI
Comments to	email
Contact Page	Form
Created	Jan-01-1999
Updated
Copyright �1999-2001. All Rights Reserved.