Advice from the Factory
Marketing your Site
Now that you have your site all tucked in at your host. The job's not done until we let people know we are out there, ready to do business. And how do we accomplish this? Several ways; First we use the resources that most hosts provide for free. The hosts interests are to see you succeed, if you do not then you will not be there next year doing business with them so it is best they provide you a tool called a submission form. You fill out a form that is submitted to the search sites, this gets you on a list for the search sites web bots to go to your site, scan it and list it into their database to direct people to the relevant sites. Other search engines even scan their rivals, so as to find out what is new or even what is no longer on the web. One of the other things that can be done is to have a web marketing company market your site, but this an extra expense. Then there is a "pay per click" approach, this is another type of web marketer that has different sites run banners or ads on different sites. These sites have a special code connected to them that identifies where the click came from and the site owner that runs the banner is then compensated by a certain per-arranged amount depending on how popular the sending site is. You pay by the per click on the banner. Here are some of the site companies that do that, Overture, Yahoo! (when clicked from their site) to name a couple.
What may sound unusual is auction sites as a marketing tool. If by any chance you are selling an item or items on them, more then likely you also have a special area/profile that is maintained by you. In this profile, with most auction sites you can have a link to your web site (assuming that you have had it just built). The usual is that you just cannot have an item at a lower price then what it is on the auction site, on your site (if it were us, we would not sell the same thing on our web site as at the auction site at the same time). Think about this for a minute, you can drive traffic to both ways, drive to the auction site with your specials listed there, need anything else? Well just go to our web and see if we have it there. As you can see now online auction sites are a popular place to be selling, slow moving items, close out items or special "limited" items, you can and will drive traffic to both places using this approach as a marketing tool.
Another tried and true method is to simply hand out your business card to everybody and anybody who will take it, hey even give them a couple, who knows were the extra business cards will end up? Maybe even to people who just happen to need your service or product at the time. Hey it has happened to me!
Above all you have to promote you, you are the company. If you do not promote you, nobody else will. Success or failure all hinges on what you do to market your site.
Rick