Effective Marketing the Most Important Component of a Successful Website
How do you create a successful website? What are the contributing factors and how do you know what works? These are all questions anyone who is considering creating a money making website may ask. The answers to these questions and many more are likely to be on the minds of anyone who is considering creating a website for profitability. It is essential for anyone who wishes to make money online to research and become educated in the concept of creating and maintaining a profitable money making website. It’s not as simple as building it, submitting it to the search engines and hoping someone will find it. There is much more work involved than meets the eye.
Knowing you have more work than you had planned when you initially thought of creating a website should not deter you from venturing into the online community to make money. Keep in mind what you are doing now is probably not providing you with the things you need or want to maintain a standard of living for you and your family. Most people who are working for someone else do not live as comfortably as they could if they had their own business. Think of a job as an acronym for Just Over Broke, and you will understand why having your own profitable money making website is the key to online financial success.
In order to create a profitable money making website it is essential to develop an effective marketing plan before you begin attempting to sell any products or services from your website. In fact, the best way to assure profitability quickly is to develop a marketing strategy before your website is ready to go live—you can even begin marketing efforts before your website is completed. The earlier you begin the more effective your efforts will be. What you want to do is have some customers ready to make purchases as soon as your website is ready.
Always direct your efforts toward your target audience rather than attempting to promote your website to everyone online. While this may be very attempting when you are starting out it is a waste of time and effort. An effective marketing plan focuses on the target audience and reaching those who are the most likely to purchase what you have to sell whether it’s products, services or a money making program.
Low Cost Marketing Tools for Your Website
When you first start operating a money making website you may be working on a shoe string budget. Just because you have limited funds does not mean you will not be able to effectively market your website. There are many different methods you can use that have little or no cost involved. There is no need to feel you have to spend a lot of money advertising in order to get your business up to speed. While paid advertising certainly has its advantages, you can save those expenses for later when your website is more profitable.
One of the easiest ways to market your website without any effort is including the URL in the signature of your Email. This will allow you to advertise your website every time you send out an Email without worrying about being accused of spamming anyone. The link will show not only when you send out Emails but in any forwarding Emails others may send as long as they include your original Email. While most people don’t like unsolicited mail on or offline this method gives them an option—they can go to the link or ignore it.
Link exchange programs are also good ways to promote your website. With this method other website owners add your URL to their websites in exchange for you doing the same for them. In this way you substantially increase the number of people who see your URL and thus increase the chances for additional website visitors. Remember, the more visitors your page has the better the chances are someone will buy something you have for sale.
Free for All (FFA) pages are also free or inexpensive way to promote your website. You have to be careful with these, however; some of them require an Email address which will open the possibility of receiving unwanted advertising. You can also choose to have your own FFA page and allow links to other websites on your page. Depending on the traffic coming to your website, you may or may not wish to take advantage of this promotional method.
Submitting your website to free or inexpensive submission services will help your website gain visibility. However, you also need to make sure it is optimized for SEO (search engine optimization) to assure your site has a high ranking with the search engines. This is necessary so your site appears early in a web search since most people only review a maximum of three pages of search results.
SEO and Meta Tags Enhance Search Engine Visibility
When you are building your website one of the things you will need to know is Meta Tag descriptions. You can choose a free Meta tag generator which you place in the upper left hand corner of your website so the search engines are able to categorize your website. Unlike SEO, Meta tag keywords may not necessarily appear on your website, but they allow web surfers to find your website based on those keywords. For instance, if you have an accounting website you might include the words “straight line depreciation,” but it may not appear anywhere on your website.
In addition to Meta tag keywords and descriptions it is essential to ascertain that your website is optimized for the search engines. What this does is assure that your website has high ranking and when a web surfer is looking for products or services that you offer, your website appears on one of the first three pages. The reason for this is because most web surfers will not proceed beyond the first three pages of search results. Therefore the earlier your website shows in a search the better the chances are they will visit your website.
Search engine optimization involves a specific set of different keywords and keyword combinations that are visible on your website by way of articles or descriptions. An SEO expert will review your website and help you assess which of these keywords will help your website receive the ranking it needs for your money making website to be profitable. They will also help you follow the numbers until you are confident your website is among the first to appear during searches under those keywords. Sometimes the combinations may not make sense to many of us, but SEO experts know what works.
Both of these very important components will help make your website more visible and of course, higher visibility means an increase in traffic. While they will not make your website profitable as such, but what they will do is provide the resources it needs in order for you to reach more of your target audience. Statistically, the more people you reach the more sales you will generate. Thus you need to ascertain you make use of both Meta tags and descriptions and Search Engine Optimization. The combination of both of these proven methods will help your website’s visibility so more people will visit your website.
How Effective are Online Classified Advertisements?
Many people tend to think classified advertisements are the most effective way to gain new business. This mindset comes from their exposure to advertisements in their local newspapers which do not work the same way as online classifieds. While you may gain some traffic from classified advertisements, most people who visit online do not read classified advertisements. If you are looking to add more customers to your database you can certainly take advantage of the free or low cost classified advertising, but you do not want to rely on it for all of your marketing needs.
On the other hand you will find some classified advertising sites that will actually provide you with a highly visible advertisement that may actually be beneficial to your business. Make no mistake about it: the classified advertising that will make a difference to your business is not free. Of course, you will need to spend some money in order to promote your business, so you may choose to make this one of your cost expenditures, though it may be better spent paying a SEO expert. It is advisable to include these costs in your original marketing plan so you know your budgetary costs for advertising and other marketing schemes.
If you are going to use classified advertisements you should choose those that have substantial traffic and offer high visibility advertisements. It is in your best interest to stay away from free advertising since these advertisements tend to appear far down on the pages and will not provide the visibility you want and need for your website. You want to set aside enough in your budget to pay for those advertisements that offer “bold and beautiful” ads: bold type, large type and a selection of options to set your ad apart from all the others.
You might keep in mind there are print newspapers that also have websites, and many of these also offer the option of print, online or a combination of both in their advertisements. If you want the best exposure for your business you should choose both print and online advertising. In that way you reach the largest target audience and gain the most for your investment. Some newspapers offer special pricing if you choose a combination of online and print advertising— this is your best option. Trade magazines with a large distribution are also good sources of classified advertising, especially if you choose those that are within the scope of your website.
Should You Use Pay Per Click Advertising?
When you are on a budget for advertising, there are many different methods you can use to save money. One of the most effective and inexpensive ways to advertise is with pay-per-click advertising. While most advertising requires the advertiser to pay a flat fee up front based on the length of the advertisement and the length of time it will run in a particular publication, pay-perclick allows the advertiser to choose how much he wishes to invest in advertising, and he will pay a pre-determined amount for every person that clicks through to his site from one that has his banner or link on it.
How effective is pay-per-click advertising? One thing to remember is the majority of people who click through to your site from another site are already interested in what you have to sell, so the money that is deducted from your balance because of someone who clicks through will usually result in a sale. For the advertiser that means he is only paying for advertising when there is a good possibility for a sale. Thus instead of paying a substantial amount of money to advertise in classifieds, newspapers or trade publications you decide how much you want to spend, and you only pay based on the number of potential customers who actually come to your site from another site.
While pay-per-click advertising is more effective for E-commerce or other business sites, it can work for any website that offers products or services for sale. The key is ascertaining your links are only placed on websites that may have visitors that are interested in what you have for sale. You want to avoid paying for people who are only interested in “browsing” and have no intention of buying what you have to sell. As long as you choose the right websites for placement of your links pay-per-click advertising is very cost-effective.
The choice to use pay-per-click advertising is available to anyone who chooses to use it, but whether it will be worthwhile in your particular case depends upon your target audience as well as where your links are placed. This is only one of the many marketing methods you might wish to consider when you are ready to promote your money making website. You don’t want to limit yourself to just one method, thus combining pay-per-click advertising with other methods will provide the best overall marketing strategy.
Website Submission Services Improve Your Visibility
When you are finished creating your website do not have the misconception that potential customers will be able to find you. Unless you submit your website to the search engines the only visitors you will have are those who find your website because you have provided it to them in some way. In order for your website to come up in a search you must submit the URL to the search engines or potential customers will be unable to find your website. You will find many different options for website submissions with prices that vary from free submissions to several hundred dollars.
If you are on a tight budget and plan to use one of the free submission services, you want to be careful which one you choose—some only submit to about twenty of the search engines while others will submit to as many as forty. This saves you from having to individually submit to his search engine and allows you to easier track which search engines are placing your website in their databases. The other thing of which you need to be aware is the free submission services usually require you to place a banner on your website in exchange for them submitting your website.
If your budget allows for premium submission services you also have many different options. The price for website submission will vary based upon many factors including the number of search engines to which the service will submit your website. The more expensive ones will submit to over 600 search engines in addition to thousands of directories. This provides the most exposure for your website and thus gives you the best opportunity for increasing visitors to your website.
When you submit your website to the search engines you want to ascertain how long your URL will remain in the active database. While some search engines only require re-submissions every few months, some will keep you in their database until you request removal. If you aren’t certain about the policies of each search engine, you can attempt to read all of them every few months—they will notify you if you are already in their database. You should submit your website to as many of the search engines and directories as possible in order to gain the most exposure for your website. If potential customers can’t locate you in a search you will not have additional visitors to your website to create more sales.