Web Site Marketing Strategy

Creating A Marketing Plan

For starters, you have to figure out exactly what you're trying to accomplish. "Improve traffic and revenue" isn't specific enough. If you get one more page view and one more advertising dollar after six months worth of efforts, does that still qualify as a success? You need something tangible as the end goal, preferably with a number of smaller, partial goals along the way. So, state your objective clearly: How can you increase X to accomplish Y by time Z?

Web Site Marketing Strategy Ideas

Now that you know the criteria for success, you have a guiding light in the distance and have to figure out how to get from here to there. Here are a few ideas for how to boost your online presence without breaking the bank.

Site Redesign

Take a hard look at your site next to your closest competitors. Sure, you're familiar with it and see it every day, but try to take a step back and look at it as a newcomer would. Do the other guys present their stuff better? Do they have a slicker interface? Are they doing something you're not? Again, it doesn't matter how popular your feature X was when you created it three years ago -- look at it today and try to spot where your competitors are doing a better job. Never underestimate the negative impact of a cluttered or outdated front page when visitors tend to make split-second decisions about whether the stay or Google again to find what they're looking for.

Add More Value

What does your audience really care about? To use the example of the motorcycle model site earlier, adding an extra feature like a review of metallic paints from different manufacturers might be of great interest. For a stock-picking site, adding a portolio-tracking app that allows your users to run hypothetical scenarios could make your site stand out from the other small guys and bring you one step closer to the authority of "real" finance sites. Simply put, try to anticipate what the users may not even know they need yet.

Create a Community

The "online community" hysteria isn't quite as frenzied as it once was, and many companies discovered that if you build it, they don't automatically come. Sure, a manufacturer of faucets may have a really dedicated fanbase that is both IT literary AND passionate enough to populate a wiki about 1/2 inch pipes, but many "community" efforts fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Lesson learned: context and topic matters. But if you DO have a topic that may carry enough fodder for a discussion, by all means give it a shot, since this is what creates the coveted "stickiness".

Search Engine Optimization

Get a few books on the topic and run some searches, and you might discover that your oh-so-clever headlines and articles reek from an SEO perspective. These days, making yourself visible to Google is everything, so make every effort to make your content easy to digest for the electronic brains at the world's search engines.

Avoid This!

As you've noticed by now, the suggest so far has been more about strengthening your site content rather than bang the drum and blow the horn about the site. There's a reason for that, and that is that it's usually a better (and cheaper) long-term strategy to spend your efforts on quality rather than slather on evermore lipstick on a pig. Along the same lines, here are some things to avoid:

Don't join scam circles -- Be wary of "fantastic" marketing schemes promising to triple traffic overnight by adding you to a group of sites like yours, especially those requiring a steep up-front fee.

Don't pay for SEO -- On the same note, any offers you get promising to catapult your site to the top 10 results in Google is dubious at best. Most search engines base their rankings on who the de facto leaders are, and giving money to some slick guy with big promises isn't going to make your startup bookstore beat Amazon.com out of the top spot.

Don't spam -- Spamming costs almost nothing, and amazing as it may seem to you and me, there are still people out there who fall for Nigerian bankers and "herbal Viagra" offers. That doesn't mean you should jump on the bandwagon; long-term success rates aren't very good, and any current customer/user who get spam from you may be less than thrilled.

Don't sell information -- Finally, your regular users have put some measure of trust in you and your site; that's why they register and become regulars. Don't betray that trust by selling their info, even if it's just email addresses.