This is Part Four in a four-part series of articles designed to answer the question we get asked most often: How Do I Get Started on the Web?
Getting Started on the Web, Part IV: INTERNET MARKETING
Marketing your website on the internet is hugely important. If you don't let people know about your site, it's like the proverbial needle in the haystack.
What IS Internet Marketing?
In order to let people know about your website, you'll need to submit your site to the various search engines and directories. It's not brain surgery. You can do it yourself, but a good consultant / marketing specialist can help you with the process and save you a great deal of time.
The days of free listings are almost at an end, unfortunately. But there are still free listings to be had, and many of the search engines now offer relatively cheap listings, and if you have the advertising budget for it, you can get placement in the top 3-4 listings by signing up for one of the bid-for-placement programs, such as Overture offers. Google offers free inclusion, but also offers a bid-for-placement option. The advantage to these programs is that their listings "feed" other search engines. That means your listing in Overture will also show up in the other search engines affiliated with Overture, such as MSN, and AOL.
Advertise in Spurts
If you don't have the marketing budget to keep up this kind of paid advertising on a regular basis, consider getting paid listings just prior to special events or for the first month of your website launch. Why? One: free listings can take up to 2 months to appear in the search engines. Paid listings appear immediately. And two: free listings are a crap shoot. You wait two months for your listing to appear, only to find out your site is listed on page 10! You have to go back to the drawing board, edit your keywords and meta tags, revise your layout. Then you wait for the search engine "bots" to come around again and re-index your site. With a bid-for-placement listing, you are guaranteed to be at the top of the page, or on the right side of the page, depending on the search result page layout. The point is, you're not buried on page 10. And that is a huge advantage. But, depending on your industry, the competition, and how high the bidding is for those choice spots, you might not be able to afford long-term listings.
Other things you can do to draw traffic to your site:
- Request cross-links from related sites. This may mean adding a "links" page to your own site.
- Participate in newsgroup discussions and mailing lists. And be sure to use a good signature file at the bottom of your email!
- Buy a banner ad. This can be very costly if you want a banner posted on one of the large search engines, but affordable banner advertising can usually be found with smaller directories that target your industry, or regional directories.
- And don't forget the traditional stuff! Be sure to include your URL (web address) and email address in all your printed advertising materials.
For more information, be sure to visit some of the sites listed in our Related Links. The internet is constantly changing, and some of these sites have proven invaluable in keeping track of the shifts and trends in search engines.
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