How to get people to visit your website

 

cattle

By Amanda Greenslade

The yard rails are up—now to bring the cattle…

 

Once you have a website, you need to learn how to get people to visit it. Launching a website is not like launching a book. People want to know about new books. Websites, magazines and newspapers publish book reviews, key spokespeople in the industry talk about the new books in their field, authors attend webinars, autograph parties and speaking engagements and bookstores put (some) new books on their shelves, giving them about three months to demonstrate saleability. Life on the Internet is somewhat different to this as there are over 100,000 new websites being launched every day (visit Domaintools.com for details). The world is, understandably, far less interested when another new website gets launched, especially if its scope is only small.

So how do you get people to visit your shiny, new home on the web?

One—Tell everyone about it

Send an email to all your friends and family about your new website, encouraging them to send it on to anyone they know who might be interested. Add your site to your email signature so that it appears at the bottom of every email you send out (if you don’t know how to do this, please contact me for help). Add your website to your business cards, letterhead, flyers, posters, signs, brochures etc. Do a letterbox drop in your suburb using A4 print-outs from a laser printer advertising your business and the fact that you have a new website. Somebody in your suburb might be interested enough to take a look.

Two—Search Engine Optimization

Ideally, you and/or your website designer have some knowledge of search engine optimization and have already built the basics into your site. SEO is a set of tactics you can use to target your website at your intended audience in such a way that the search engines recognise your website as a valuable resource for them. It is a field of expertise that is constantly changing in line with new ways search engines index pages on the Internet. The algorithms search engines use are often based on common-sense and they even penalise attempts to manipulate the system. SEO involves things like:

• Having a consistent focus or theme, with related terms in the page titles, headings, body text, image captions and (to a lesser extent) meta tags
• Having lots of other websites of a similar theme linking to yours (credibility)
• Being in existence for a long period of time and/or being updated regularly if it is reasonable to expect this of your type of website (eg. adding new articles daily or weekly)

You can learn about Search Engine Optimization yourself by researching online. Read about SEO on Wikipedia (follow all the links and read those too). Subscribe to the free email newsletters from Search Engine Watch, for example. Then listen to the coaching calls on Rich Currie’s blog here: http://www.prowebsitemaker.com/recordedcalls.html

Three—Advertise

Other websites are the best place to advertise your website, because the people visiting those sites are already online and are only one click away from visiting your site. There are many ways you can advertise your website online, including exchanging ads with other website owners (no cost), using search engine advertising like Google AdWords (you choose how much you wish to spend) and contacting actual advertising agencies (more expensive). As much as the Internet is a place for people to gain information, there is still great value in printed publications.

“Reading a computer screen is slow and painful. The ballpark statistic is that a screen can be read at 28% of normal reading speed” (interbiznet.com/greatweb8.html).

Creating small ads in your local newspaper, other people’s newsletters and email bulletins etc. can be a way to create leads. Whether you send them to your website or just provide an email address and phone number is a choice you will have to make for yourself. Will they be more likely to give you their contact details after seeing your site, or purely from seeing the ad? If you are going to send people to your website, ensure the site aligns well with what you state in your advertising. Also make sure the website makes sense to somebody stumbling across it without having seen anything else about you. Is it clear and easy-to-understand as a standalone advertisement for your business?

To find out more about starting your own website and getting people to visit it, try reading articles online, going to web development seminars and talking to IT professionals. Different people will tell you different things and it is important to reach the right balances for your business. Enhancing your own knowledge and staying positive is the key to success.

---

Amanda Greenslade is a communications expert with experience in writing, editing, graphic design, email marketing, website design and video production.

Posted by Morinda International AU/NZ on July 13, 2009

http://tniaunz.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/visitors/