Designing your website is a process in and of itself. Once you have a real, live website, you may feel as though you can sit back and watch the traffic come in. Wrong. There is a lot involved in actually getting your website to function as an effective selling tool for your business.
Marketing
Like any other part of your business, you must market your website. You have to get the word out there in order for people to be aware of your website. Then, you must give them a reason to visit your website. What do you have to offer? Is your product going to solve a problem for them? How are you different than your competition? Like your brick and mortar business, you must get people in the door before you can sell anything.
There are hundreds of ways to market your online business; online marketing is a topic that is ever changing and evolving. Just a few examples include Google Adwords, banner ads, affiliate marketing, enewsletters, ebooks, ezines and articles, and social networking sites. You can even market your online business using offline methods. Choose the methods that make the most sense for your business.
Tracking
Regardless of which methods you choose to market your online business, it is absolutely crucial to track your marketing. Without a clear picture of what is happening in your business, you will not be able to determine what is bringing the most leads and which leads actually produce the highest profits for your business. Luckily, online marketing is fairly automatic when it comes to tracking. You just have to make sure you use a good tracking method that you can use to easily make sense of your results.
Testing
What do you do with the results of your tracking? The next step is to test your marketing. Drop what doesn’t work or tweak it to see what does work. If one method isn’t working, consider a different channel. Remember to give your online marketing enough time to test each version of an ad. Also, remember that quantity (or amount of traffic) is not the entire picture. Just because a certain marketing method drives a great deal of traffic to your site does not necessarily mean that the traffic is profit generating. Be sure to test your marketing with your final ROI in mind.
Repeat
To grow your business, marketing must be constant and repetitive. Remember that sending out one email blast will not do justice to your business. Marketing is all about consistency and performance. Repeat that which performs and stop doing (or test differently) that which does not perform.
