WebMaster Solutions
Web Site
Marketing
Getting Your
Business Noticed
by Kenneth Catto
Many people will
tell you that to get your web site noticed you
need to 'optimize' your site for the search
engines. You are then led up a path where you
have to keep changing your web site as the
search engines change their ways of listing
things. As fast as you 'optimize' your site,
Google and the others have moved the goalposts,
meaning you have to keep optimizing over and
over again.
Now consider some
facts. Most people in the world are not users of
the Internet. Let's repeat that. The vast
majority of people who you want to reach don't
use the Internet. It doesn't matter how well you
optimize your web site, they simply will never
find it.
Here's another
fact. Some of the best Internet marketers make
most of their sales 'offline'. They sell their
books, CD-ROMs and so on at seminars, workshops
and conferences. Indeed, for many 'Internet
marketers' these 'offline' sales represent the
bulk of their income.
So what do these
facts tell us? They show us that 'offline'
promotion is more important than online
promotion. You may be able to optimize your web
site to get high rankings in a search engine.
But that doesn't mean you'll reach the vast
majority of people who could buy your product or
use your information.
This was confirmed
recently by one study that showed most people go
to an Internet address (URL) after having read
it in a newspaper or magazine, been given it by
a friend or colleague, or having heard it being
mentioned by someone speaking at a meeting or on
TV. In other words, it seems that significant
numbers of people who get to your web site will
do so having heard the URL somewhere outside the
Internet.
You can get many
people visiting your web site, even if you are
not ranked highly by the search engines. You can
do this in two main ways:
1. Write articles
for use in regular publications - newspapers,
magazines and so on. Always include your URL in
the article and you'll get millions of people to
notice your web site address.
2. Speak at every
opportunity. Make presentations to business
clubs, chambers of commerce, local societies -
you name it, you should speak at it. Every time
you speak, announce or your web site address.
Although these are
the two principal ways of gaining offline
publicity for your web site, don't neglect your
business stationery, posters, car stickers and
so on. The more your web site address is visible
outside the web, the more visitors you will get
regardless of how kind the search engines are to
you.
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