Website PromotionSo what now. What do you do with your website ? If you want to sell stuff on your website you're going to have to rely on either E mail inquiries or phone calls or you can get set up to do E commerce. To do it for real you need to get set up with Secure Socket layers (SSL) which usually can be set up if you have your own server or sometimes ISP's can provide this service for your Domain Site. Secure Socket Layers encrypts the data being sent so only you can open it on the receiving end. You also need to get set up to accept credit cards via your local bank or credit union. Verisign is one company that controls the licenses for SSL. Visit them for more info. Luckily there are some alternatives for setting up a storefront which makes it very affordable. There are websites which provide you with a shopping cart system and accept the credit cards for you. Then they notify you to ship your item to the customer and a week, two weeks or a month later they send you a check minus their commission on the sale. No or low up front fees to set this up. The web company E mail's you the code you need to paste into your web pages to activate the shopping cart. Visit http://www.ccnow.com or http://www.bagboy.com to see how such a company works. There are many others you can find them by researching E commerce. Next... make sure your website is complete or near complete. make sure you have META Tags on all your webpages and that all your navigational and other hyperlinks are working. Now its time to start announcing your website and posting your pages up to the search engines so people can actually find you on the web. The first step is to research similar types of pages or directory style sites that make lists of sites available to web users. Lets say your page has to do with fishing and you've found some pretty cool fishing pages out there that list other websites on their links pages. All you need to do is E mail the webmaster for that particular website and ask them if you can be listed. Tell them you'll gladly add their site to your links page and of course give them your webpage URL. Make sure in your E mail that you type in the absolute path starting with http://www.yourwebsitename.com or http://www.isp.com/yourwebsitename. By typing the entire path in an E mail message usually makes it an automatic hyperlink in a received E mail.(not always) E mail programs are most of the time smart like that. Then when they receive your message it is an automatic link to your website and all they have to do is click in. You don't even have to write the code to make this work. They may then respond and say okay lets do it. then put their web URL on your links page in return. Its kind of like the buddy system. What it does is broaden the network and remember the more places you are listed ... the more people will find you. Also web search engine spiders and robots read the links you have on your pages and see if the other pages provide a loop back to your pages. The more loops back to you often times the higher in the search engines rankings you will move. There are many thousands of websites that are only too willing to list your site for free. Be aware that others may try to charge you. Most of the time this is a waste of your financial resources but often times and advertisement in the right place targeting the right market can reap huge rewards if you happen to be linked to a high volume website. Also if you take out a web an advertisement make sure that the website really does get traffic. It won't pay to advertise on a site that gets even less traffic than your own. Also utilize banner exchanges like we mentioned in an earlier lesson. Link and banner exchanges do work. Since most of the time you will begin by being buried in the search engine lists. Find out who the high traffic sites are in your desired categories and try to get those sites to link to you. There are many websites dedicated entirely to web marketing and promotion. Search for these and read what they have to say on the subject.A really great resource is http://www.virtualpromote.com. This website has articles on everything about web marketing and more importantly it has a huge list of search engines. The best way to get listed on search engines is to go to eacha nd every one individually... find your desired categories and use their submit or add URL forms to add your website to their database. Keep in mind that the really big search engines can take many, many months to start listing you while smaller ones will list you immediately. keep in mind that just because you use the same search engine all the time doesn't mean everybody does. Post your URLs to all the search engines that have relative categories which you might belong in. There are literally thousands of Search Engines and directories where you can post your info. There are also some websites that provide free website submission tools that can submit your website to 25 or 30 or 40 websiates all at once. These help speed up, the process but don't usually allow you to select keywords or select categories like you can when you go right to the specific search engine. The founder of http://www.virtualpromote.com also has a search engine submitter on his other website http:www.jimtools.com. Also check out 123Add It and other such sites. Another often overlooked marketing tool are newsgroups or bulletin boards. many websites have their own bulletin board systems where you can find messages from people who have similar interests. The way newsgroups and bulletin boards work is someone posts a message and then you post a public reply to it. Now that doesn't guarantee they'll read it since they need to go back to the website to read your response.However often times E mail addresses are also provided so you can send a copy to their E mail address. So how do you find newsgroups or usenets as they are called ? Go to a search engine such as yahoo and search for "newsgroups" or "usenets" and you will get the big list. To be more specific search for whatever category interests you and newsgroup or usenet such as "guitar usenet" 
Click on the link to the newsgroup and your browser ( not all browsers have this) will launch what looks like an E mail box however it is instead a Newsgroup Reader. 
Click on any message topic and the actual message appears. Notice their E mail is included... Messages starting in RE:" are from people responding to posted messages. 
Read the messages to find out what people are interested in and E mail them if it
looks like they might be interested in your website or products.
http://www.deja.com has a newsgroup search engine which searches all newsgroups for the desired topic Go to their power search page and search for a topic like you did when you looked for newsgroups. 
What displays is similar to what displayed with your newsgroup reader however all you need is a browser to view newsgroup messages this way. 
So don't E mail everyone in the newsgroup. Its called SPAM and it isn't very nice. Also some Newsgroups are moderated and have rules. You can't sell stuff on certain newsgroups - only have discussions. But nothing says you can't discuss that you found a really cool website at such and such an URL and if they're interested they should check it out. I have one client who makes Mustards and Sauces and I peruse the Cooking Newsgroups weekly to find people intersted in recipes that might be interested in their products. As long as I use proper web etiquette no one seems to mind my E mails ( of course there are exceptions). If you start spamming everybody pretty soon you'll start to get what's known as Flame Mail which is a kind of Hate Mail or someone will send you a hundered copies of the Declaration of Independence effectively jamming your E mail service until you mange to get them downloaded and off your system. Target marketing is the most effect way to promote your site and with a little logic you can find the people who will be interested in your website. There are tons of Classified ad sites out there and other resources where you can advertise your site. Then get busy figuring out how to organize the data you will be collecting. Start building a database for E mails, addresses , phone numbers, customers, prospective clients, and if your ISP provides you with your Web Stats figure out how to translate them. Hits or requests are not the number of visitors. You could have 100 pages viewed but that doesn't necessarily mean a hundred people came to your websiite. Sometimes web stats can even provide you with information such as who is sending you the most visitors or who is currently logged on. Each ISP has a different way of setting up your stats ... call them to find out how to get yours. Stats may only be available to Domain Sites. For those of you with personal sites... you can get your stats by signing up for the Fast Counter or Banner Exchange services we mentioned in an earlier lesson. So put together your website... put together your plan of attack... and get out there in cyberville and do your thing. Good luck |