Marketing Your Web Site

Marketing Your Web Site
By Gary Ferrington

Just because you've developed a fantastic web site doesn't mean that you'll have a steady stream of visitors. Getting customers to your site comes about through an on-going marketing campaign.

My research has located several online resources that I would encourage a web designer to visit. Some of the concepts you'll find may be very familiar and others very new. For example, did you know that targeted print advertising may be more effective in getting specific customers to a web site than a top ranking by a search engine?

There are many books and online discussion groups that focus on the topic of internet advertising and web promotion. For our purposes I am going to suggest a few informative resources that will be of help in planning any web marketing campaign. I hope that the information you find at these sites provide the bases for developing a marketing strategy appropriate to your needs.

Mircrosoft's Components of a Web Site Marketing Campaign is of the more informative references that I've found. It provides 11 suggested actions a web designer can take to make sure a site is located by potential users of that site's products or services. It is very well organized with clear suggestions as to actions one might take to create an effective marketing campaign.

NetPromote's Promotion 101 - Web Marketing Info Center provides a well written set of six steps for web promotion plus linked articles on such topics as; branding, banner advertising, e-mail marketing, web site optimization, and use of keywords and META tags.

An article by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, The Web Marketing Checklist:29 Ways to Promote Your Web site expands upon suggestions made in the first two resources suggested above. Of particular interest to me was the suggestion that keyword be included in the first paragraph of your web site's text field. Search engines will often pick-up information about a site from that section of a page. Many other good ideas related to the design phase of a web site are included.

Webcom's article Marketing Your Organization's Web Site supplements our other listed resources. Of particular interest to is a link to Unacceptable Web Site Promotion Techniques that addresses certain actions for getting exposure that may be destructive (perhaps illegal).