To bring in customers from your web site - you need to attract the right traffic.
The simple fact is that there are millions of carefully designed web sites on the internet attracting virtually no visitors. All singing, dancing spectacular web sites, stunning flash animations with wonderful graphics. Some of these having been prepared at great expense by their owners but if they are designed without any thoughts to bringing in customers they will more than often fail.
Lets think about how visitors find your web site and how we can attract those potential customers.
1) Organic Search - the primary driver of traffic on the internet. These are simply users typing in queries into the likes of Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. The results are then delivered to the users.
2) Search Advertising - PPC (pay per click) these are the adverts that appear to the top and side of the search engines results. The adverts are served by the search engines and are targeted like the organic results based on the query entered.
3) Conventional advertising - in non-electronic media, newspapers, business cards etc. Never expect your website to just magically attract visitors - it simply doesn't happen.
4) Utiliizing electronic media - advertising and promoting your web site on the internet.
There are other methods but most can be categorized into one of these areas. All of these areas can be targeted to bring in more traffic - this can be done by yourself or with the assistance of a professional skilled in these techniques.
Promoting your web site (and hence your business) on the internet is not difficult - however it can be very time consuming especially if you have to learn as you go along.
What can you do?
1) If you normally use conventional media to advertise your business - never switch straight to the web. Incorporate your web site into your normal advertising - always include your web address in your advertising, and include your email address as a contact. The two advertising medias can support each other - if possible include as much information about your products or services on the web site. The conventional media can be used as a portal to your web site where customers can go for more information (and saving you expensive cost per words in normal advertising).
2) If your web site is not attracting customers or traffic you need to step back and try to think how your customers will find you. Most internet users looking for a product or service start by using a search engine - they will type their query into a search engine and look at the results. To target these users your web site needs to target some of the keywords that these searches are using. Think carefully - if you were looking for your product in Google what would you type into a search engine ? Ask friends and colleagues the same question and compile a list of likely keywords. Your web site should target those same keywords in order to appear in those search results. They should be included in the title of your page, used consistently within the copy of your page. There are several simple methods to optimize your website for these keywords. Search the internet for SEO, Keywords or on page optimization for a full list.
3) Promoting your web site in the search engines can take quite a time, if you want quicker results and are prepared to pay - you could consider a Pay per Click campaign. Don't be intimidated by these - Googles advertising is very simple to use and you can set strict financial limits. Remember to set your budget and check your results regularly. You can become very poor - very quickly using PPC if you are not careful. The clicks you buy must bring you paying customers not browsers.
Nobody gets any of this right straight out of the box - it's important to analyse your website traffic. Two simple ways to do this are to use Google Analytics and Webmaster tools - both are free and fairly simple to use.
