Driving Website Traffic & Marketing for Small and Medium-sized Businesses
Attracting suitable prospects to your business is a difficult, but critical task. Luckily, your new Internet presence will make prospecting and selling your products and services even easier and less expensive--if you make your site visible. Here are five methods to help you attract potential customers to your site.
- Search Engines
Make sure to register your site with the most popular search engines: Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite, Netscape, Lycos, Hotbot, Altavista and Webcrawler. It's free and easy and only takes a few minutes. Getting a higher listing in search engines is tricky! Do some research on ways to improve your ranking.
Tip: Some sites will register your site with all of the search engines for you, such as Submit-It. Visit the Web Site Garage, for a free tune-up to make sure your Web pages are optimized for the search engines.
- Press Releases and Announcements
Announce new features or changes to your site. This can be done through press releases, local newspapers or magazines, or even e-mail, if you have a list of customers who have agreed to receive e-mail from you. Consider sending out a monthly newsletter, or if you already have one, add a special section devoted to your Web site.
Tip: Find a linked list of the top ten online press release submission sources at: http://www.toptenlinks.com/Internet/press-release.vote
- Partner on the Web
Find other sites that you think your customers might visit and offer to develop a partnership with them. This can be as basic as exchanging links or banner ads.
Tip: Visit Link Exchange for some great ideas on how to partner with other small business sites to increase your traffic.
- Write an Article
Submit an interesting article to a print or online publication, and include your URL. Besides promotion, an article can help to demonstrate your company's exceptional industry knowledge.
Tip: Don't forget to post and promote your published articles on your Web site.
With so many inexpensive ways of promoting your Web site, building traffic to your site and increasing the online visibility of your company will be a snap.
Next Topic: Increase Your Web site's Stickiness
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