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.
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:
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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