So, why isn’t anyone coming to your website?
This is probably the no. 1 issue facing most businesses’ websites. Businesses spend thousands of Rands on creating beautiful websites and then once they are live forget about them and wonder why no traffic and no enquiries or leads are coming in. A lot of entrepreneurs seem to think that their idea or the way they represent it will magically create lots of traffic to their website, or they have a really good domain name so traffic is a guarantee. Just like any traditional type of business, you need to promote your website or online shop for it to produce any income for you.
How do I promote my website?
Paid Online Advertising
There are various ways to promote your website and the first and most obvious is usually by means of online advertising. There are various different channels and mediums by which one can do this. For example: Google Adwords, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Bing ads and many other ad platforms. One need only to Google it to know where to get started. I would recommend that every new website start off with an online advertising campaign, so that they can get traffic immediately and immediately start winning. This type of marketing obviously costs some money, but far less than what flyers or advertising in magazines would have cost a traditional business.
Social Media Marketing
The second form of advertising we would recommend is Social Media Marketing. This is when you create your own professional business pages on the most popular social networks relative to your industry, and then start sharing valuable content through these pages to your target audience. But first you need to build your audience size to at least 1000 people or you might as well be posting your content to your own bedroom wall. To get your audience growing quickly you can invite all your friends to like your page, go share your page on group pages, or again use some paid advertising to get your page likes/followers growing quickly. Now for some reason a lot of businesses forget about their website at this point. The reason you created your website was to properly communicate your products and services to the public, so don’t try and explain the whole deal on Facebook or Twitter. Only give your audience brief snippets of content and direct them to your website from there to see the rest.
Email Marketing
Email is still one of the most powerful advertising mediums around and can be a quick way to start getting traffic to your website immediately. Be careful not to spam though, as this will get your domain reported and your emails will start landing in your clients’ spam boxes. Rather put a newsletter signup form on your website asking people to sign up for notifications. You will have much better open rates and conversions when sending to these lists anyway, so the effort will be well worth it.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation is the ongoing process of improving your website’s content and usability as well as it’s exposure on external websites, with the aim of getting your website to rank higher in the results of search engines. For this type of marketing you will probably need an expert, although we have had clients who managed to do this by themselves. They had done it for others for years though and knew what they were doing. Beware of “SEO experts” making big claims like: “you will be on the first page of Google within 1 month”. These types of characters tend to use a lot of Black Hat tactics which will eventually get your website penalised, and getting even less traffic. If you cannot afford this step yet a good idea will be to simply start creating a blog about topics relative to your business. Even if you know very little about SEO you might be able to generate a little bit of traffic from articles you have carefully prepared with keywords relative to your industry. Eventually you can acquire an SEO writer to help you with this.
These are the 4 basic pillars you can use to get started. Depending on your type of business there might be other opportunities to generate traffic to your website. Contact us any time for help with your website’s traffic or marketing.