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posted on:
3/13/2011 5:56:38 PM EST
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Two Tasks Your Website Must Address
business websites, online marketing, free internet advertising, internet advertising for small busin
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To follow up from yesterday’s blog post I will continue with the two tasks your site must address.
Firstly, it has to give people what they want, and it has to be constructed in such a way that it enables you to build a relationship with prospects who have seen your site and are interested in what you have to offer (irrespective of where they are).
Secondly, you must understand from the outset that you can have the best website in the world, which might nevertheless be a complete waste of time without one thing.
Once you have created your interactive, relationship building website, it is absolutely essential to do everything possible to make sure that people find your website because without that, you have no prospect of making sales either.
This is one of the biggest mistakes that companies or individuals who decide to start an online business make. Whether it is a brand new business or an extension of an existing ‘brick and mortar business’ it is absolutely essential that you learn what it is that sends people to a website, because without this knowledge, your online business is dead in the water before it even ‘sets sail’.
The stories of would-be online entrepreneurs who came up with what they believed to be a world shattering idea, and spent months on developing that idea and an associated website, only to find that they never sold one product, are quite typical within the online business community. In almost every example, the primary mistake was that the individual or company focused all of their time, effort and attention on completely the wrong aspects of building a site based business.
While your business does need a website that does what your prospects and customers want it to do, it does not need a perfect website (if such a thing exists).
When they do eventually launch their website, they sit back to wait for visitors to start arriving. And they wait. And they continue to wait… Until eventually, tired of waiting and finally becoming aware that the world was not ready for their brilliant idea, they can the whole thing and that is the last the world ever sees or hears of it.
The problem with this scenario is that visitors do not simply arrive on your website. It is possible that the odd visitor might turn up every now and then by mistake, but there are never going to be enough of these people to keep your business alive, and the fact that this visitor arrives by mistake indicates that they are not going to do business with you, because they are not targeted.
It is targeted visitors you need, people who are genuine prospects for your product when they arrive on your site, because they are pre-qualified before they come.
As an example, imagine that you have a website from which you sell green widgets. As part of the promotional efforts, you pay for advertising to be placed on other widget related web pages, or you write articles that you submit to the International Widget Association who publishes your articles on their site.
In both of these examples, in order to be presented with your promotional materials, an individual would already be visiting a widget related web site. They are doing so because they have some interest in widgets, and so, if they choose to follow the link to your site from your advert or articles, they are a hot pre-qualified prospect for your green widgets.
In terms of online marketing, getting your website seen is important. However, it is nowhere near as important as getting your website seen by pre-qualified prospects, because these are the people who are most likely to become your customers a little further down the line.
So, how do you find targeted prospects of this type?
The first answer is by publishing promotional materials like advertising, articles and so on. This is something we will look at in a later blog post.
The second way you drive targeted traffic (i.e. visitors) to your web pages is by getting the search engines to find individual pages of your site and present them to people using that search engine to find information like yours.
This is where search engine optimization (SEO) starts to come into the picture, and why it is so important to your business website.
In a blog post tomorrow we will consider the basics of search engine optimization.
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