Drive traffic to your website - the cost effective way

Spending time on creating a good website design is extremely important as it ensures that users get the most out their experience. Once a new site goes live it’s important to have a plan for how you will start driving traffic to it - people don’t just miraculously arrive at your homepage, just like you wouldn’t expect them to turn up out of the blue in a conventional shop. There are a number of reasons why people arrive at a website, and not so surprisingly some of these involve well established marketing and publishing techniques. Below are some tips about how you can increase traffic through these channels - the good news is that most of them can be achieved with nothing more than a little bit of time and effort.

Word of mouth - tell everyone. For new websites it’s important to let customers know that you have gone live. It is essential that you publish your domain name on everything, brochures, business cards, and packaging and include it in all of your emails as a signature at the end – you’ll be surprised how many people find out about your website by one of these ways.

Create links everywhere. This is the electronic equivalent of walking along the high street window shopping as people browsing other relevant sites will come across links to yours and click on them. Get as many links to your site as possible in other relevant places, for example, with your suppliers, customers, membership organisations and Yellow pages. It’s important that these links are selected purposefully - a link from a sports shop to a fast food store is unlikely to result in any successful results, but one from a sports shop to a local football club might. The added bonus of creating links to your site is that many search engines (Google, AOL, MSN) will use the number of links from other websites to your homepage as a way of measuring its importance. Therefore by having more links you will also boost your search engine ranking.

Get Searched. There is much hype about how to get your website listed on search engines, and there are certainly a plethora of companies that offer services claiming to enhance site rankings. Some of these tools and services are useful, others are a waste of time and the money would be better spent elsewhere. As mentioned previously, one of the most important factors for getting your site listed on search engines are external links. This is one of the fastest ways to get noticed, especially if you get a link from a site that is relevant to yours and already highly ranked. There are many other tips and tricks and you can find out more here. However, most important of all when considering search engines is to ensure that you have good content on your site, as only by having something worth visiting will you start to get people arriving from search engines.

Email Marketing. Something very different from the SPAM that most people’s inboxes are flooded with, email marketing is the use of email to contact new or existing customers. Marketing your website in this way has many benefits: it’s fast, cheap and allows you to attract a global audience. However, as with conventional marketing tools it’s important to direct your efforts at a target audience with defined objectives, giving them plenty of reasons to visit your web site. By far the most successful of all email marketing techniques is the eZine - a regular electronic newsletter that contains relevant news, updates and special offers. Keep such emails brief, relevant, and try to create the feeling of membership to something special as it will keep people interested. It’s also important to make it easy for people to subscribe and unsubscribe from these newsletters, if you fail to do the latter you may soon find yourself breaking the law.

Banner Ads. Advertisements on the web are controversial and the success rates sometimes disappointing (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9709a.html) as users are now savvy about the use of such ads. However, by selecting the right partners to advertise your products/services with and spending time on determining what you are aiming to achieve in any campaign, it is possible to achieve good results. It’s important to think about where to place your advert - make sure it’s located somewhere relevant so that it will attract the right kind of users. One particularly successful location is the pay per click ads available on Google. These adverts are successful because they are delivered to the user in context with the search they are carrying out. This ensures that the adverts displayed add to the search results rather than act as an annoyance such as randomly displayed ads on other sites. Other very useful locations to place your advert include listings in online directories such as www.yell.com and www.yahoo.com because users are actively looking on these sites for relevant businesses.

Customers returning hold the key to success. Once you’ve managed to tell customers about your site, get listed on the major search engines and create links from a number of other sites, there’s one very important thing not to forget: give users a reason to return. Companies like Amazon.com have been particularly good at focusing on repeat purchases or visits and this is one of the reasons why they have been so successful when others have failed. It’s great to achieve the first sale through your website, but businesses are founded on loyal customers and only when they return will you really have a truly successful business model.