Summary
A common mistake by new website owners is that once your website is up, 1000’s of visitors will flow to your website. You need to tell people you have a website otherwise your website will not offer real value to your business.

How to Market your website

Steps you should consider planning while the website is under construction:

• Re-design all your stationary so it contains your website address (business cards, brochures, letterheads – anything that contains your logo or address).
• Prepare a letter or email telling your existing customers about your new website and send once the website is live.
• Think about which search keywords you would like to rank highly in google – eg chinese restaurant Shellharbour.

Once the website is launched, continue to take steps to market your website:

• Tell your customers when talking to them about your website and ask them to visit.
• Add specials or coupons to your site – a great way to get people coming back if you offer discounts. A small printable 10% voucher is an example.
• Ask some of your key customers to review and provide feedback.
• Update your website with the latest information as quick as you can. New or updated content will keep people coming back.
• Make sure your content is well written and of high quality. This will attract visitors and keep them coming back.
• Create content that has the targeted google keywords to help with your google ranking
• Get other quality websites to link to your website. This will improve your google ranking
• Launch a google adwords campaign if it is suitable for your product or service. Be careful with this as you can quickly spend $100’s a day with no return. A lot of planning and careful testing is needed.

You should use your statistics program to review progress and see if your strategies are successful or not. The statistics program really helps measure the success of your website marketing campaign.

This article is written by Sam Steele, project manager at DeboSoft - a website and graphics design company.