Small Business Websites That Work

By Sean McManus
Published by Prentice Hall (Pearson)

• Buy 'Small Business Websites That Work'
• Book website homepage
• Read the introduction in full
• Free chapter: Planning your website and creating the content
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• About the author

Promoting your website

Your website will falter if you have poor content or impenetrable design, but it will die if you don't promote it

At a glance:

• Chapter summary
• Updates at this site

Chapter summary

Website promotion needs to permeate your whole business. There will be activities you undertake for the first time, such as registering with search engines and possibly advertising on other websites. But you should also make sure that your site is promoted widely throughout your company on 'free' advertising space. Tell receptionists the address and when they should refer customers to it. Ask sales assistants to chat to customers about the site.

If you've got the content right, other websites will want to link to yours and customers will want to come back. Make it easy by telling them how to do so.

Don't waste time on ineffective promotion. Target your customers as narrowly as you can and create a promotional message that will give them a good reason to visit the site. Use it everywhere you use your domain name: make your potential customers feel like they're missing out if they don't visit.

Promotion doesn't stop after the site's launched. You'll need to keep bringing previous visitors back to the site and keep telling your new walk-in customers about it. You'll need to keep attracting strangers to your business through the website as well.

Armed with data on who's coming to your site and what they're doing there, you can re-promote it to increase awareness among other target markets you need to break into. Chapter 11 discusses how to find out who's visiting.

These are the subheadings in this chapter:

• Introduction
• Get the content right
• Choosing the right promotion methods
• Real world promotion
  • Using existing customer contact
  • Getting press coverage
  • Advertising in the press and on radio
• Online promotion
• Search engine registration
  • Technology tips: optimising your website for search engines
  • Internet Myth: Submit your site to 3000 search engines
  • Paying to be in search engines
  • A final word on search engines
• Attracting links
  • Technology tips: linking
  • Syndication
  • Operating affiliate programmes
• Webrings
• Advertising your website online
  • Tips on designing adverts
  • Banner exchanges
• Successful email promotion
  • Junk email or spam
  • Advertising in email newsletters
  • Discussion groups
• Loyalty schemes
• Awards
• Bringing visitors back
  • Publishing an email newsletter
• Viral marketing (including Ecards and referral mechanisms)
• Summary

Updates at this site

• Kickbacks for clickbacks: an introduction to affiliate marketing
• Inside the mind of a spammer
• Making email newsletters work for you
• Making the headlines: how to get press coverage for your website
• Making your website visitors more loyal
• Free Meta tag generator and meta tag tutorial
• Free link popularity checker
• Google Dance tool
• The spam fairy: a bedtime story about email marketing
• Tutorial on syndicating your own content