So you have your new website, which has cost you a lot of money, and it has recently gone live. Yet the hundreds of enquiries you expected to pour in from the website have not materialised and the 100 visits your site is getting each day are all from your office. What has gone wrong?
The short answer is nothing has gone wrong.
Many people, when they get a company website, have unrealistic expectations and think that having a website will suddenly bring in thousands of new customers from all around the globe. The first challenge is making it easy for people to find your website. Of course we all know about registering with search engines but, when there are approx 600 million websites on the Internet and they cannot all be top of Google, one should not rely totally on search engines for delivering visitors to your website.
There are other ways, apart from search engine submission, to get visitors to your website.
Online
Web referrals are an effective way of driving visitors to your website. There are a number of ways you can generate these.
- Include your web address in all email footers.
- Email newsletters – sending email newsletters of offers and new products can be quite effective. People send them on to others.
- Banner ads, Pay per click – rarely free, but can help bring people to your website.
- Reciprocal links – if you know a site with similar content to yours, ask them link to yours, but be prepared to reciprocate.
- Blogs, Forums, social network sites etc – whenever you use one, end your entry with a link to your website.
- Directory sites – register with as many as you can and when entering details of your business, remember to include your website address.
Offline
The website complements rather than replaces existing marketing activities and, therefore, should form an intergral part of your entire marketing strategy.
Ensure your web address is included on:
- packaging,
- promotional items,
- all business stationery,
- invoices,
- business cards,
- all publications about the business,
- Word of Mouth – talk about your website at every opportunity to customers, family & friends
I analysed the stats for my website (www.jez-d.co.uk) and only 1.5% of visits are referred from search engines. The vast majority are direct requests, that is, not from a link on the Internet. This shows that other methods as mentioned about actually do work.
