Having an appealing website is just not enough. If you have no one visiting your site and it doesn't generate any sales, what is the point of it? This is not an effective website to say the least. It is important to improve your online marketing efforts to be profitable.
Decide what the primary goal of your website is. Directly selling products and services through e-commerce or capturing leads to do follow up with customers by phone or e-mail? If you are choosing e-commerce you will need to have a design with a shopping cart system. This will encourage people to buy items and put them in the cart. If you would prefer to just capture leads provide content that is informative and interesting to your potential customers.
Have a contact form for the potential buyer to fill out on your site. They should be able to submit this form and also be able to call you 800-number to ask questions, get details, or purchase if they are not comfortable with the web. For small businesses it is really not needed to spend tons of cash for an elaborate and professionally done web site.
If you are not able to design your own and need some one else to do it for you, it shouldn't cost you more than $300. The key to a professional site is to work with a designer who will listen to you and translate your words to an awesome web page. They need to be as good at listening as they are at designing. Once the web page is done you or someone else must be able to easily update it.
You should be provided with an easy use content management system. This will let you edit your web page with out the need of the designer. You want to save as much money as you can. Once you have your awesome page, you want to venture into search engine territory. There are two main categories of search engine marketing that can be used separately or together.
These are SEO and Pay Per Click. With SEO, your goal is to up your page ranking so you hit the top list in major search engines like Google. Find some niche keywords and work to use these to your advantage. You want to be more specific with your keywords.
The broader with the key words you use, the worse you will do. The best way to get up in the ranks is to have your site linked to high rated sites. The sites should be relevant to yours and use similar keywords. Submit your site to as many directories as possible. These directories should be organized by topic making it easy to figure out what is relevant to you.
Many sites like Yahoo will ask for money to get your submission through and is worth it. You are looking at $300 per year, but you are now on a top search engine. For any thing else you will have to submit you query and hope they look at it soon.
Now you will talk with your vendors and see about link exchange. See if you can link with them and you will post their link as well. This is a great way to share clients and get more hits. You next step will be to write articles. You will want to add articles that are interesting, informative, and generate business.
These will include keywords that will find you on the net and gain you notice. Publish your articles in your field and that will increase buyers too. Remember with SEO it can take up to a year to see any real progress so don't think this is instant success. There are a number of Pay Per Click providers. Google ad words are currently the dominant PPC system out there right now.
Google keep track of all your conversions and the cost of each one. Set up a daily budget and a maximum bid on specific keywords. This could be $25 total for the day or $1.90 per click, what ever your preference is. You may end up spending less or sometimes more. You only have to pay if someone clicks on your add.
How much you pay will depend on the keywords you use and how much you bid. You can use tools to help you pick out the best keywords for your business. Google will require a special code in your web site to be able to track your conversions.
This is not that expensive and should be considered as a great and inexpensive marketing tool.
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