Website Marketing Made Easy, Part 1

by John Eberhard

Most people who have a website for marketing their business have one of three problems with it.

1. The website is producing no leads or sales and they have no idea what to do, or whether anyone is even coming to the site

1. The website is producing a few leads or sales, but the owner doesn’t know how to increase it

1. The website is producing a decent flow of leads or sales, and the website owner wants to increase that, but doesn’t know how

Made Easy

The basic concept of website marketing is that you want to drive as many people as possible to your site and then you want to make sure the site is set up to actually convert those visitors to leads or sales.

There are essentially four methods of driving people to a web site:

1. Pay per click advertising (PPC)
2. Non-paid, or “organic” traffic from search engines
3. Driving traffic to a blog, then referring visitors over to the main website
4. Social media marketing

One vital thing to do to help you measure your progress is to ensure your site has a good web statistics program installed. Most free ones you get with your hosting plan are garbage. If you don’t have a good one, I recommend installing Google Analytics, which is free. It shows how many people are coming, what pages they are visiting, where they are coming from, and for search engines, what keyword they entered to find you.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click advertising through Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center is still the fastest way to drive traffic to a site. You can put up a few campaigns and start increasing traffic to your site dramatically inside of a week. And it is extremely effective. I always start a client with a campaign on Google.

Basically your text ads appear on Google, as one of the first three ads on the top, or in the narrow right-hand column, and when people click on those text ads, your account gets charged.

If you sell a low ticket item, however (let’s say under $100), pay per click is not usually the best way to go, because your Google charges for the people coming to your site will often be more than your profit margin for the item you’re selling.

But for high ticket items, pay per click advertising is ideal. And it has the added benefit that you can exactly target where your ads will appear in terms of geography, which makes it ideal for local businesses such as home improvement.

Organic Traffic from Search Engines

Organic traffic is defined as traffic that comes from the regular, non-paid listings on one of the search engines.

Google, Yahoo and MSN can bring a great amount of traffic, but only if your site is ranking well for keywords related to your topic that have some decent traffic (a lot of people searching for those keywords every day).

So how do you know if your site is ranking well for your keywords? And what do you do if it isn’t?

You can go to Google and enter a few keywords and search through the pages to see if your site comes up. I use software called Market Samurai for this because I deal with a lot of keywords.

If your site isn’t ranking in the top 50 results for your keywords on one of the major search engines, you’re not going to be seeing much traffic from that. If that is the case, the first thing to do is have some keyword research done, because you specifically want keywords that have traffic but do not have a ton of competition. And I find invariably that if people aren’t trained in how to do this, they will select single word keywords or other keywords that have a million-plus sites competing for them. And you’re just not going to be able to rank for keywords like that. So you need to select keywords with good traffic but low competition.

Once you select a good list of keywords, then you need to make sure those keywords are well represented on your site, including in some invisible areas of the code. This is called search engine optimization.

Next you have to engage in a program of link building, which means to get other sites to include a link to your site. Google says the number of links coming to your site from other sites is the most important criteria in their determining how high your site will rank for any given keyword. Most sites, if the owners haven’t done any link building, will have a few hundred links or less. You need thousands.

As you build up links, and if you have selected your keywords well, you will see your search engine rankings moving up for those keywords. This is a 6-12 month process.

Next week I’ll cover driving traffic with a blog and with social media.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous