How
to Make Your Website Make You More Money
-
Website
Promotion Tip # 1 - Don't promote a bad website. 
Your website can be a big business asset or a big business
liability. It can make you money OR cost you money! Make
sure your website is rich with content (packed with detailed
information that your prospective customers want and
need) before you tell the world about your website. Having
said that, don't wait until it's "just right" because
that time often never comes. A website should be an ongoing
process, not a one time project. Make some quick & easy
(sometimes major) changes now, submit your site, and
then improve it/add to it more over the next few months.
QuickLinks: website
design || website redesign
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Website
Promotion Tip # 2 - Let the search engines know that
your site exists.
Research shows that approximately 70-80% of website
are found via the Search Engines. Google, Yahoo!, MSN
and AOL have the lion's share of this market. Sites that "rank
high" in
the BIG 3 often do well on most others. Submit your site
- don't wait for them to one day eventually stumble upon
your site on their own. This is not a one time project.
Re-submit your site to those engines where you rank poorly
after you make changes/additions to your website. You
can do this on your own OR you can save time, aggravation
and avoid "over submitting" by hiring an SEO
firm (such as Cole WebMarketing!) to do this for you.
-
Website
Promotion Tip # 3 - Target the right keywords.
It's critical to know what your prospective customers
are exactly searching for. Find out what keywords/phrases
they actually type at search engines. Then, make sure
your site has many of those exact words. Some SEO firms
will "guarantee
25 Top 10 Listings". Being # 1 at a word that no
one searches for, or at a search engine few people use,
is not a bargain.
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Website
Promotion Tip # 4 - Paid Advertising via PPC
Paid listings and buying PPC (Pay Per Click) keywords
are becoming more and more common.
Search engine advertising can be
a highly cost-effective solution that gets results.
It helps to build brand awareness, increases traffic
to your site, and provides measurable return on your
investment.
Some recent research showed that the average cost
per lead on a search engine is $0.29 versus $1.18 for
yellow pages advertising and $9.94 for direct mail
inserts. More than 40% of U.S. consumers research
their purchase online. Fully 66% of consumers use
the Internet and TV simultaneously; and once online,
80% of their Web usage starts at a search engine.
The
top 3 places to put your money include: Google AdWords,
the Yahoo! owned
Overture and
MSN
AdCenter.
-
Website Promotion Tip # 5 -
Offline
Promotion
Over
the years, research has shown that 20-30% of websites
are first discovered in printed buying guides, magazines,
direct mail, CD's & newspapers, so don't discount "off-line
advertising" when promoting your website. Also,
many websites are found as a result of an email received,
so you might wish to consider a targeted "e-marketing"
email campaign to promote your website.
- Website Promotion Tip # 6 - Increase your "Link" Popularity.
A lot of websites are found for the first time from links on other websites.
The more websites that link to your site, the easier it is to find. Maybe just
as important, search engines view site with many links leading into it as "more
popular"
and this will help to improve your rankings. Monitoring
your ongoing Link Popularity should be part of any
good SEO program.
