The other day one of my clients told me that they weren't happy with the amount of traffic coming to their local business' website. With the website online for only a few weeks and with very little marketing outside of word of mouth with friends & family, I wasn't surprised.

A common theme that I see when businesses go online for the first time is that they expect to have loads of traffic, leads or sales appear at their virtual doorstep with little effort. This is setting yourself up for a disappointment when your website is online.

If your business opens a physical store front it costs quite a bit more in overhead and startup costs than a virtual storefront, but if you've chosen a good location you get quality foot traffic every day. Your new website has the benefit of much less overhead, but no automatic foot traffic. Surprise! That part is up to you.

Its very important to have realistic goals for your Online Success and realistic expectations for what its going to take take to acheive those goals.

Whether you are hiring a professional (like Niche Tank) or you're pumped up to market your new website yourself, you should decide what type of marketing campaigns will work well for your business and your audience. I'm going to introduce some online marketing concepts that I hope help you get a better idea of what resources you have available.

This article is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all the strategies you can use to build traffic to your website. It is meant to be a good starting point for those that want to begin marketing their own website or want to be in the know when they hire a professional to help with online marketing.
 

Search Engines
I am listing search engines first because that's usually the first thing that people think of as the way new visitors will find their website. Its no myth, search engines can be your biggest ally, but (usually) only if your website has interesting content, and lots of it. If you hadn't already considered including a blog with your website, you'd better consider it now. Adding interesting and relevant content (think text, videos, photos, etc) to your website on a regular basis is a tried and true way to ramp up traffic to your website.

The important key words here are "regular" and "interesting, relevant content". The more interesting your content is, the more readership you will have. Sounds obvious right? Well it's not always as easy as it sounds. We aren't all natural writers and for some this skill takes more time to hone than for others. But don't let that discourage you because it can be fun and the reward is worth the effort, after all that's why you are creating a website for your business in the first place right?

Without a blog your website should already have at least several pages of content, and if you're thinking "why can't I just rely on those pages to bring me traffic?" well yes you certainly can, but alone they probably won't deliver the results you're looking for.

You don't have to think of a blog as a blog in the traditional sense, you could brand it in a way that makes sense to your business. i.e. Articles, News, Tips, Advice, Case Studies, Recipes, etc. you get the idea. Start a blog on the same domain name as your website, add interesting content and keep doing it weekly or more often if you have the time. Check your web stats every few weeks and see what happens!
 

Advertising
On the other end of the spectrum from organic (free) search engine traffic is paid advertising. If you have a budget to spend on your marketing campaign, you should consider putting a portion of it towards paid advertising. Unlike many other online marketing strategies Advertising delivers traffic much faster, you can consider it both a short term and long term effort. There are several different types of online advertising, but the ones you should look at first are Pay Per Click (PPC) and Affiliate ads.

• Pay per click is just that, you pay for each click to your website that you receive. There are many pay per click advertising networks, but one of the most popular is Google AdWords which will display your ad directly next to search results, I'm sure you've seen it before. Pay per click ads with Google or with another network can also display your ads throughout other websites on the internet. The trick with PPC is finding the balance of the right target audience and cost per click. PPC can be hard to optimize without a professional's help, yet for some people PPC optimization can be worth the time and effort to learn.
   
• Affiliate ads are quite a different animal altogether. Affiliate networks gather up on one side many advertisers and on the other side many publishers (websites that want to make money by displaying ads). So far this is similar to many PPC networks. The main differece is that Affiliate advertisers make payments not per click but per sale. You may get many clicks from an Affiliate ad but only when a sale is made from one of those clicks do you pay a commission. Naturally you will be paying a higher amount per sale than per click. Average commissions range between 5-20% of the sale, depending on the type of product, your profit margin, etc. But the goal is to offer attractive commissions to your affiliates. Just as with PPC networks there are many affiliate networks out there. When you compare networks keep in mind startup fees, monthly fees and commissions.
   

Email Subscription
Building an email subscription can be an ace up your sleeve. By the very nature of an email subscription list, only emails of people that are very interested in your website, product or service will be collected. For that very reason your conversion rate (think percent of sales) coming from people who subscribe to your newsletter will probably be much higher than any other normal campaign you run (SEO, Advertising, etc.). This is because when your audience signs up for emails they are telling you they are very interested to hear more. They may be on the fence about purchasing your product, perhaps they are already a customer, or they are just really interested in what you are doing.

For that reason you should take care with your email subscrption list, you don't want to give them reasons to unsubscribe. Don't send emails too often to the point it's annoying. Do try to offer interesting content, fun content, special discounts, deals, sales, and/or something that compliments the interesting content (see Search Engines section above) on your website that got them interested to sign up in the first place. A word of warning: The email list will take a long time to build, like SEO it's a long term investment and will probably take even more time to ramp up, but in the long run it will prove extremely valuable.
 

Social Networks
Social networks are another great way to build up an audience for your products and services. Like email subscriptions or SEO social networks are going to be a long term investment of your time. See a pattern here? Web traffic usually doesn't come easily or quickly, especially these days since there are more and more competition online than their were 10 years ago. Social networks are a great way to stand out from your competition that hasn't got on the bandwagon yet. But don't just set up a Facebook or Twitter page for that reason alone. Start a social media campaign because you care about interacting with your audience, hearing their feedback and getting an opportunity to improve your product or service. It might be a big challenge especially if you are new to social networks, to build and engage your audience. There's a lot of buzz and you don't want to get lost in it, but if you are sincere and interesting in your messaging, your brand's loyal fans will listen. Over time your fanbase will grow, help spread the word about your brand, and provide you valuable feedback.
 

Link Building
Link building refers to increasing the amount of links to your website from other websites. If you get more links to your website its only natural to expect more traffic to your website (granted the websites linking to you have some traffic). Generally the more links to your website the better. From a search engine's perspective this is also true and they will reward you for quality links. There are a number of ways to build links to your website, but here are a few ideas for you:

• Network / make friends with owners of other websites or blogs in your industry whose audience would find your service useful and ask them to link to your website perhaps in exchange for a link back,
• Write guest blog posts for a blog that shares a common audience providing some valuable article in exchange for a link back to your website.
• Answer questions and offer help in an online forum related to your industry or product. Link back to your website in your signature or wherever relevant in your replies without being spammy.

In a nutshell, the key to a successful online marketing campaign is spending the time to send out a quality message to your target audience using the resources you have available. Its not rocket science but with some regular marketing effort and practice you'll start to see results within a month or two and those numbers will continue to grow, especially as you evaluate your results and hone your marketing campaigns.

I will be expanding on these topics and introducing other tips to driving traffic to your website in upcoming articles. If you enjoyed this article I incourage you to sign up to subscribe to updates to Online Success by email or RSS.

If you decide to consider enlisting a professional's help with online marketing, call Niche Tank at 949-207-7714 for a free consultation.

As always, wishing you the best in Online Success.

Yesterday Facebook updated their promotions guidelines allowing any business to run promotions or contests through their Facebook fan page. Contests and promotions are great marketing tools because they can help stir up buzz and get people interested in your business. Contest entrants will likely be eager to sign up to receive further promotional material in exchange for a "ticket stub" claiming chance to win a good prize (keyword is good). Running your contest through Facebook allows you to tap into your fans and more potential fans across the social network. The more fans you have and the better your prize is, the more chance your contest has to go viral.

A recap to bring you up to speed: Up until this change to the promotions guidelines, Facebook required you to have written consent in order to run a promotion from your Facebook page.  If you didn't have consent you ran the risk of losing your fan page and hard earned fans and getting consent was extremely hard to do without spending $10,000 or more on Facebook advertising. Why? Facebook is being very careful about how Facebook is associated with 3rd party contests, not to mention privacy issues, knowing very well that Facebook is a powerful marketing tool. Now Facebook approves contests but they are still being very careful about how they are presented in conjunction with outside promotions, which is a smart thing on their part, at least from a legal perspective.

How do you run a promotion or contest from your Facebook fan page? There are two ways:

1. Hire a web developer, like Niche Tank, to develop a custom contest tab on your Facebook page. Since it's customized to your specifications, the contest entry form can look however you want and can collect whatever data you want it to collect from your demographic. This route will cost you between a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars depending on how detailed your contest submission form is.  The benefit of custom development is that you can customize your contest form to your exact specifications, and with little to no adjustments (i.e. cost to you) you can re-use the contest form many times for future promotions.
2. Purchase a subscription to a 3rd party promotion service, like Wildfire, and build your promotion yourself. A slick interface makes it easy for you to build your own contest and plug it straight into your Facebook page. There are a lot of options, probably a lot more than you need. A well structured pricing plan allows Wildfire to offer a low introductory rate ideal to small businesses ($5 per campaign and $0.99 each day the campaign runs). The downsides are your contest entry form and emails that your entrants receive will be branded with Wildfire's logos (unless you buy their beefy "white label" plans, ideal for larger companies). If you want your promotion to run for several months or run several promotions a year, the cost starts adding up. Also, if you want to ask your participants any questions besides their name and email (i.e. a survey) then you will need to upgrade beyond the most basic plan.

Once you have your contest online and running on your Facebook page you need to market it! Your contest won't go viral by itself, it needs some coaxing on your part. This might be the kicker for a lot of businesses that want to run a promotion but haven't built up their Facebook fans yet.  Accumulating fans on your Facebook page is hard work (and a topic for another article for Online Success) and well worth the effort. Once you have hundreds or ideally many thousands of loyal Facebook fans you have a good basis to start marketing to. If your Facebook page has a few dozen fans it's not going to be worth your investment into a contest. Once the word does start getting out it will have a chance of going viral by word of mouth and getting picked up on sweepstakes sites like Sweepstakes Advantage where customers keep a keen eye out for good deals.

The most important thing you want to do when you are marketing yourself, aside from being true to your brand, is to maximize results. If you are setting up your contest on Facebook you'll want to make the contest available to your web visitors and your email subscrpition list as well. Remember you are giving a way a good prize (or promotion) so you want to share it with as many people as possible. The more exposure you have and the better your prize the more chance you have to get new interested participants outside your current loyal fan base & customer base. While you are asking people to sign up to your Facebook promotion it might be a good chance to include a super brief survey in order to gather more valuable marketing info.

Final note: You don't have to run your promotion through your Facebook page. The third option I didn't mention above is to run the promotion outside Facebook (on your blog, website or another 3rd party service) and then link your Facebook fans to that promotion from your wall. You will still be able to promote it to your Facebook fans. However, if the promotion lives inside your Facebook fan page on a dedicated tab, there is more chance your fans will sign up because they won't have to leave Facebook (it's cozy).