My website is launched, now what?
Creating your website is a major step. Now you need to
drive traffic to your website.
As a small business owner your time is limited and driving a website can consume a lot of time.Brenda offers Webmaster Services. A comprehensive program bundling multiple organic services to boost your search engine rankings, tackle reputation management and more.
The Internet changes so frequently. What worked five years ago no longer will net the same results. This can easily frustrate website owners. My blog is devoted to these continuing changes. Here are more ways you can drive your website.
- social networking
- encourage reviews
- add a video
- add a blog
- email marketing
- mobile website
- internet advertising—Pay-Per-Click. Read how to make an informed choice.
Somewhere you have to decide how much time you have to devote to this. Facebook makes it easy. Add a Google button to your website and let it do the work. LinkedIn is a professional network, join and connect as you have time. Find the
social networks
which can be eased into your business day. Use Pinterest and Instagram if you have products, artwork, photography for advertising. Not every social media platform is for every business. Choosing where you might engage with existing clients and find new ones.People Talk
Reviews help drive your website. Let people talk about your business. Reviews on Google+ give an added benefit of being displayed on your "Google Maps" (now Google+) next to your listing. Yelp was built on reviews and its users are faithful. Negative reviews need a response. For the busy business owner this is part of my Webmaster Services.
Add a Video
Business videos are exploding into an essential interactive marketing tool. Every website can benefit using video. YouTube is the second biggest search engine—owned by Google. When you're ready to use a professional, our partner Douglas Simon Photography & Video will manage your project from scripting to editing and final production.
Add a Blog
Blogging is a great tool to drive your website providing new content—which is attractive to Google. Time is the factor to weigh before taking up blogging. It can take 15—30 minutes easily, depending upon the depth of your articles. You cannot copy from other sources just to fill your blog. Google recognizes duplicate content and penalizes websites for this.
Use your blog to educate your visitors, and connect with others in your business community. Contribute to other blogs with a link back to your site, but again, this needs to be authentic, thus the time factor becomes substantial.
The purpose of my own blog is to easily pass onto my clients Internet changes which affect their online presence—keeping them informed.
Email Marketing Works
90% of cell phone users read email on their phone. Make sure your email newsletter is viewable on cell phones. Collect your existing clients email addresses and get started.
Those slick, pretty emails emails (HTML) from Amazon.com can be created with the help of your web designer. These are the most customized emails. The files you see are actually hosted on your server. The email is small so it quickly drops in your Inbox, then grabs the files to display. Quick and custom layouts.
There are a number of free email campaign managers (Mail Chimp, Constant Contact) which allow up to a limited number of emails per month, but have a large variety of templates, or let you create your own. These companies have a great product for handling your campaign providing great results reports. This has a learning curve, but if you have a staff member who can handle it—it's a great tool. For those with no staff I offer this service.
Auto shops can make use of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms to send out general service repair emails and more, plus handle newsletters. These platforms are offering more and more services for effective marketing. Every market has a CRM platform.
Web designer's tips on how to drive traffic to your website and build a
