As a continuation of my two-part series on how to market your small business on the internet, this article discusses what, in my opinion, is the second most feasible way to drive high quality traffic to your website.

By now, most business owners know that when people have a question or problem, they turn to the internet to look for information . They're possibly looking for the best deal on a product or service, or perhaps they're looking for a "how-to” guide. When this happens, you have the opportunity to present your website right in front of their eyes - if it's properly optimized for search engines.

1. Search Engine Optimization - If your website wasn't built with search engine optimization in mind, then you're likely missing out on a lot of potential business, or your website may be attracting the wrong type of prospects. In either case, a properly optimized website should always be the concern of a small business owner trying to attract more business from the internet. So what exactly is Search Engine Optimization? To keep it simple, I define Search Engine Optimization this way: it's the process of building a website in such a way that search engines find it relevant with respect to an internet user’s search.

Search Engine Optimization offers the following benefits to small business owners:

• Cost per lead is much lower when compared to traditional forms of marketing
• Performance data can be gathered and tracked with ease
• Search Engine Optimization can be fine tuned to improve results
• Typically a website that's optimized for search engines is optimized for users too

If your website was properly optimized, you or your search engine optimization specialist should review your website traffic reports every so often, review your current optimization techniques, and determine if these techniques can be improved. If your website wasn't optimized for the search engines, then you need to seriously consider optimizing your website right away.

Click here if you missed Part 1 of this two part series on marketing your business on the internet.

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All too often I get asked, “How do I drive more traffic to my website?”  Without a doubt, this is a valid question, and one that deserves special attention because for many, the success or failure of your business depends on driving high quality traffic to your website. As a professional web design company, we build every website with the idea that people don’t need a website - they need more business. Unfortunately for many small business owners, this idea is often times an afterthought. In this two-part series, we'll discuss the most inexpensive, effective actions you can take to drive high quality traffic to your website.

1. Blogging - If you're not blogging on a regular basis, you're foregoing a very effective, low cost marketing strategy to attract prospects to your business. Marketing research shows that blogging, a type of inbound marketing, results in 60% lower cost per lead and a 58% success rate as compared to Outbound Marketing strategies such as direct mail, tradeshows and telemarketing. With such compelling figures, there's no reason why anyone with a web presence shouldn't make blogging a integral part of the company’s lead generation strategy.

Blogs offer the following benefits to small business owners:

• They make creating new content easy for anyone.
• They are looked at favorably by search engines.
• They engage your prospects on a personal level compared to other forms of marketing.
• Their content is automatically distributed to search engines and subscribers.
• Their content can be repurposed and reused for your newsletter or e-newsletter.

Finally, the best reason to have a blog is that it's one of the easiest, least expensive marketing strategies you can use to connect with your prospects in a meaningful way.

Most important yet overlooked aspect of most every website

SuperUser Account / Friday, March 15, 2013 0 8006 Article rating: No rating

One of the most important and challenging phases of any website design project is organizing and collecting web content for your website. Due to the lack of content, this phase typically creates frustration for clients and results in delaying the entire project. However, the problem goes much deeper than building a website. A lack of content is usually an indication that the business owner has never taken the time to develop what we call a business marketing toolkit.

Your marketing toolkit is a word document which contains:

• Logo/Brand
• Your Core Message
• Services
• Testimonials
• Case Studies
• Compelling "About Us" Story
• Strong Call to Action

All of the above mentioned points are designed to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts. It can easily be distributed through different marketing channels and most importantly re-purposed for your website.

If you’re considering building or re-designing your website in the near future, I strongly encourage you to start developing your marketing toolkit now. If you need help creating your marketing toolkit, I highly recommend and have personally used the Duct Tape Marketing System by John Jantsch. It’s going to require some effort on your part, but if you’re serious about earning more business this year it’s well worth the effort.

 

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