Website Marketing Strategy

In order to have a successful website, you first have to define your goals for the site: what do you want it to do for you?  Are you interested in increasing exposure to your brand?  Getting people on your mailing list so you can email them special offers?  Or are you looking to create a web destination unto itself?  Once you define your marketing goals then it is possible to start defining a strategy for how to get there.  Without these goals you will just be floundering around without any clear direction.

If you are looking to create more brand exposure and simply promote your company or product, then you really need a good marketing visibility strategy.  This means that you want to position your website and the whole user experience in a way that increases word of mouth communication and gets your customers sharing the website with each other.  This works especially well if the website you are building encourages this naturally (think Facebook or Twitter, for example). 

Any time that you can create something that will "go viral" in terms of your customers sharing it with each other, then that is a very powerful thing to tap into. To some extent this is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but you can also plan for this and create a marketing strategy that encourages it. For example, websites like Facebook made it super easy to scan your email contacts and then invite all of them to the network. Without this feature, the user base would not have grown as quickly and the growth would not have been as viral.

There are a few tried and true website marketing strategies that you might try to employ. One is to pay for visitors to your new website. This is generally called pay per click advertising and you can simply bid on traffic from Google and Yahoo and drive it to your website by paying money for it. If you go this route you should know how quickly it can become expensive and have a solid understanding on the value of a new customer. If you are just trying to make some quick extra money online then this method is probably not for you.

Another marketing strategy is to hold a contest of some sort. This generates interest and interaction with the website visitors and can drive additional traffic to your site as people share about the contest. This can be very effective in certain niches, especially those that are product based.

If you are in it for the long haul (and most businesses are) then you should be focusing also on a long term strategy for your website.  This means that you should be looking at trying to build up a steady stream of free traffic to your website through seo efforts.  Seo stands for "search engine optimization" and if you do this right then you will get a steady stream of free, targeted traffic every single day.  Most people underestimate the value of this traffic because it just starts showing up eventually if you are doing things right.  But in many cases it is even more valuable than paid traffic and it is replenished every day for free, so you definitely need to focus on this strategy.

Say you run a floral shop in Chicago and make your money delivering flowers.  If this was the case then what would happen if someone went to a search engine and typed in "chicago flower delivery?"  If your website came up as the first result or even on the first page of results then you would probably be able to generate a number of sales from that.  If your website was no where to be found then you obviously would not get any extra sales coming in from your website.  There are also a number of other keywords that are similar to this that you might want to try to rank for in the search engines, such as "Chicago florist" or "floral delivery chicago" and so on.  So there are ways to target these keywords with your website and there are steps that you can take that would allow you to rank well for those terms.  The efforts you put in would likely pay for themselves over the long haul because your listing in the search engine would be fairly stable once you achieved it.