Helpful Do it Yourself Website Marketing Tips

Here are some useful website traffic generation and marketing recommendations.  Most of these tips can easily be done by anyone.

• List your business and website on directories such as Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Yellowpages.com and Superpages.com (they all offer free basic listings).
• Create a profile on facebook.com, myspace.com, linkedin.com and other social networking sites.  Make sure that your profile contains a link and descritpion of your website, if possible.
• Search for industry related blogs and forums. Post comments on the ones that allow you to provide a link back to your website.
• Your front page is the most important page!  The key to successful internet marketing is getting your site visitor to the “end result” or “action step” in as few ‘clicks’ as possible. If your purpose is to generate leads or have a potential client contact you, it’s a good idea to have a simple contact form on the front page. If your goal is to sell a product, make sure you’ve got either a prominent link to the store area or featured products on the front page. Be creative.
• Try some Google Advertising.  With Google Ads you can set your budget to as low or high as you want.  You can even target specific regions such as the state or city you live in so that the only people seeing your ad are in your region. It’s worth at least trying out a Google Ad Campaign.
• In your blog posts remember to use your sites keywords when relevant and even mention locations (city, state, etc.) if your target market is in a specific region.
• Have you thought about Duplicating yourself?  This is especially good for those who provide an educational service. You could create a video, e-book, podcast, or something else that allows you to reach more people with your message.
• Join some meetup.com groups and put your website link in your profile. It’s best if you can actually make it to your local meetup meetings, but if not, you can network with people on meetup.com.
• Figure out which keywords and key phrases will bring in more traffic. You can do this by visiting Google Trends. An example of what to do on Google Trends: If your business helps people get out of debt think of what keywords people might be typing to find this kind of website. Examples: “get out of debt” “debt free” “pay off debt” “financial freedom” “financial help”, etc. Type each on of those in to Google Trends (separated by commas). Click here to see the results. You can even narrow it down by location. As you can see, those phrases are getting a lot of results but are “financial help” and “debt free” being searched for the most. But are those phrases relevant to helping people get out of debt? Click the links to see: “financial help” & “debt free“. It appears that “debt free” is more relevant and might be the better choice, but it wouldn’t hurt to use both phrases in your content.
• Remember that your front page is the most important part of your website.  That’s what people see first.  This goes along with what I stated in #4.  Your call to action should be very clear and focused on the front page.

Hope this helps.