Web Marketing Strategy

If you have a web site, any web site at all, and you want to get more traffic to that site or expand your reach in any way, then you really need a web marketing strategy of some sort.  This would be an integrated plan as to how you can reach and achieve your online marketing goals for that particular site.

The first step in this approach is that you need to define your objectives.  If you are currently getting about 100 unique visitors per day, but somehow want to expand your exposure and reach, how many visitors are enough?  Do you need 500 per day?  One thousand per day?  Or perhaps you are interested in getting highly qualified traffic rather than simply getting more eyeballs to your site.  Perhaps you would be happy with even less than 100 visits per day if only they were much more targeted visitors who were more interested in what you had to offer.  That might be a viable goal as well and is certainly worth pursuing if that is your objective.

Perhaps you are selling something on your website, and you want to increase sales.  You might notice that your sales typically increase when your volume of visitors goes up, regardless of the source of the traffic.  If this is the case then you might want to experiment with simply purchasing traffic in some way.  There are a number of systems and advertisers out there that can do this for you.  One example of this would be through Pay Per Click advertising (PPC).  Here you can simply pay money to the search engines to send you qualified traffic when people are searching for your keywords.  If your website is about antique furniture, you would bid on keywords such as "restored antique desk" and so on.  People arriving at your site are going to be highly targeted because they were searching for your keywords when they saw your ad. 

Pay per click advertising is great because you can basically buy up all the traffic that you need and see if it converts for you.  If it does then you simply scale it up until you are buying as much traffic as possible while remaining profitable.  On the other hand, this can be a difficult thing to do, especially in a competitive industry, so you have to be careful with your budget or you can easily rack up a huge bill with PPC advertising.  Go slowly and make sure that you are profitable when scaling up a campaign.

There are other ways to buy traffic of course.  One example that is relatively cheap is buying fairly targeted visitors through Stumbleupon.  This is a social media service that lets web users flip through the web like they are channel surfing.  You can buy visits to your website for 5 cents per visitor.  It is pretty hard to get qualified traffic for any cheaper than that, but again, you want to test and go slow so that you are not wasting money.  If there is no short term or long term value in the traffic that you are buying then it is time to find a new approach.

Search is still a huge, huge part of the internet, and it would be crazy for any company to ignore this organic source of quality traffic.  If someone goes to a search engine and types in some keywords and finds your website, that is generally a very valuable, highly qualified visitor compared to most other sources of traffic.  Search engine traffic is extremely valuable.  It shows up every day, again and again, over and over, pretty much for free.  You do not have to pay for it.  And it generally converts just as well or even better than other sources of traffic. 

You can do anything you want with search engine traffic, depending on your marketing objectives.  You might want to maximize sales.  Or, you might want to grow your newsletter subscriber base.  Depending on what your goals are, you can leverage the free search engine traffic that you are getting every day and funnel them towards your goals by redesigning your website.  Ask yourself: "What action do I most want my visitors to take when they land on my website?"  Then look at your site and see if you have really designed it well for that action.  If not, maybe you can redesign the layout in order to have a stronger call to action and get better results.

Start with your marketing goals and work backwards.  Figure out what you want your visitors to do, then start testing and measuring to see if they are doing it.  Find the most profitable sources of traffic and start leveraging those and expanding on them.