Website Marketing Resource

The longer your website visitors stay, the more they will get to know your business and perhaps buy from you.

So, below are 10 sneaky, web site marketing ways to keep them longer?

1. Offer a free ebook that’s published right on your web site. They would have to stay at your web site to read it.

2. Give your visitors a different free bonus for each link they click-through on your web site. Example: “If you click on this link you’ll get a FREE course!”

3. Make your content into a story format. They will want to keep reading to find out what happens at the end of the story.

4. Offer a search option on your web site. People will stay longer because it gives them the option of searching through your web site using keywords.

5. Provide a chat room on your web site. They will want to chat with other people that are interested in the subject.

6. Write your content so it attracts their five senses. Use plenty of adjectives. The will stay focused on your web site and block out other distractions.

"With 50 other companies selling the same products and services, why should I do business with you rather than one of your competitors?"

The number of competitors you face as an online merchant grows daily. If you can’t answer that one question, it’s only a matter of time before you go out of business.

If you can answer that question and answer it clearly, communicating it to your prospective customers in everything you do, your road to eCommerce success is paved with gold!

Your USP or Unique Selling Proposition answers that most critical question. If you have studied business for very long you’ve probably read or heard about the importance of having a strong, clear USP. However, it doesn’t take much surfing online to see that few companies listen. Most know that they need a USP, they just don’t know how to develop one.

The process of developing your Unique Selling Proposition is fairly simple (note that I didn’t say easy.) I conduct intensive on-site USP development workshops for my clients around the world. By doing these workshops I’ve discovered 4 critical steps to developing your USP.

In many cases when you start a new website you are really starting at the bottom of the barrel.

Your competition probably has more money than you, they certainly have better rankings and more repeat visitors. How can you compete with that when you are on a shoestring budget?

First off, you need to get one idea out of your head that has been beat into it by countless marketing sites, E-books, and “experts.”

YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE SUCCESSFULL OVERNIGHT!

However, you can make regular and weekly progress and overtake your competition, both in rankings and sales. There are a few things you are going to have to do though.

1.) You will need to track your statistics, website visitors, and keep track of the Search Engine Bots. If you need to learn more about statistics, may I reccomend http://www.track-it-now.info . Statistics and paying attention to them are one of the important things that successful webmasters all do. You should know at the end of the week what each visitor to your website was worth.

These days, everybody is blogging.

How about you?

You can incorporate blogging into your sales marketing and achieve more success.

Have your customers publish an online diary instead of giving you a testimonial. The diary would include regularly updated entries of how customers are using your product to improve their life. You could give customers a free product or a rebate in exchange for them publishing it online.

Your customers could write diary entries about goals they have reached using your product, the positive emotions it’s given them, the fears and worries your product has taken out of their lives, how bad their lives were before they bought it, how it has helped other people in their lives, etc.

Your customers could update it daily, weekly or monthly. It will depend on how often they use your product. You could publish the diary right in your ad or link directly to the diary. You could provide the people with web space for writing the online diary or have them e-mail you the diary entries for you to publish.

As a search engine optimization specialist, I often run across search engines of different sorts than most people are aware of. This week I stumbled across a free site that is used by journalists to do background checks and fact checking on sources of news stories. I am also an advocate for personal and financial privacy and find privacy invasion particularly offensive, so this search engine offends me.

The http://www.pretrieve.com/ Free Public Record Search Engine - Person Search is an example of the databasification of all public records. It’s instructive to take a look at the results of a search for yourself in this free people search engine that is apparently used often by journalists. The linked page above takes you to the site home page which is a form allowing you to search for a person, business, address or phone number and the results pages can be frightening.

The results are listed as questions on the Pretrieve.com site in a row of tabs labeled “Property Info, Criminal, Court, Professional, Local Info, Miscellaneous” and the “Criminal” tab (Criminal) inserts your name or that of the person you are searching for in each possible source of criminal information under a link labeled “Registered Sex Offender Search” then a question with the searched name and state inserted: “Is anyone named (your name here) a registered sex offender in “your state here”? If you searched for your own name, it appears in that frightening position and startles you quite handily.

What’s in your name?

I’m not trying to be funny here, this basic question holds the key to you making much more money with your resale rights business than you probably realized.

May I ask again then: "what’s in your name"?

If you look at it, the main difference between your name and everyone’s else is well, it’s different…

And here’s the vital key to pulling massive profits from resale rights you can take advantage of instantly:

..Just be different!

The resale rights business is very lucrative but extremely competitive, without doing something different from the thousands of other resellers out there, your chance of success will be unjustly limited.

Being different makes you stand out from among the rest, and give customers a good reason to buy from you, instead of the same ‘me-too’ crowd.

Here are three powerful ways to achieve the differentiation you need:

(1) Creating a new image

You’d NOT want to use the plug-in websites, salesletters and graphics that come packaged with many resale rights products.

Everyone’s using them that’s why.

Promoting a Website is not an easy task. New Website Developers may have the impression of building a Website and sales are generated. This is far from true. There are millions of Websites. Within those millions, there are bound to be competitors. To rise above, or obtain a portion of the market-share, developers need to utilize an effective promotion campaign.

Establishing a Website is not much different than a brick-and-mortar business. Open a Deli in the heart of a City and millions of potential customers will pass daily. In contrast, open the Deli in the suburbs, and there would be one quarter of the potential customers. Obviously, the City would be much more expensive to get started and maintain, but the revenue should provide for the added expense.

The same holds true in Website Promotion. However, the landscape is different. There are no streets and sidewalks customers have to use. Therefore, our businesses need to be found by customers in a variety of places. It needs to be brought to the potential customer, or viewable from wherever they may be lurking.

Where do we start with Website Promotion?

Internet surfers use search engines more than any other tool to find things online. Search engines rank their results using a complex formula that considers web page content, link popularity and other details. This is why you should Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your web site.

First before you start you need to identify your keywords. It is critical that you know and understand the search terms surfers will use to find your web site with. If your not sure yet try thinking of search terms you would use to find your site. After you find your keywords make a list of about 50 (If you can find that many) keywords and target them.

Next you need to identify your competition. Start searching with your site’s targeted keywords and research the top ranked competing sites. Create a list of the top 10 to 15 sites and review each one of these web sites. While reviewing each of the competing sites look at the SEO methods that they use.

Although the vast majority of website traffic is the direct result of search engines, there are many offline marketing techniques that can be used to draw customers to your website. The examples listed below are but a few ways in which you can market your online presence to an offline audience in an inexpensive manner. Some of the examples listed below even can be implemented at no extra cost!

Some of these ideas are fairly common, but some are rather unique and I personally have only ever seen them employed once, twice, or at most 3 times.

But why would I want to do this? I already deal with these people offline.

Most businesses are not open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. Most websites, however, are available on a 24/7/365 basis.

Many people, especially those with busy lifestyles, tend to use the Internet during non-business hours. To give a few examples: business owners will often check their emails and visit suppliers’ websites later in the evening; and consumers looking to make a high-value purchase, such as a car or house, will often research their purchases online in advance well into the wee hours of the night.

So you have your website and you’ve done everything right on the web - search engines, classified sites, newsgroups, bulletin boards, link sites, mailing lists, etc etc etc.

And now you think you’ve exhausted the possibilities of marketing your website and you can sit back and wait for the visitors to roll in, right? WRONG!

Here are 12 extra ways to promote your website without even turning your browser on:

NUMBER ONE:
Make sure that all of your staff know your website address. They know your telephone and fax numbers, they know your “snail mail “address - they should ALL know your web site address too. Make sure that any new staff have this information along with the usual contact details.

NUMBER TWO:
Print your URL and email address on all letterheads, business cards & compliment slips, in the format www.yourcompany.co.uk This way everyone that you ever come into contact with has your web address.

NUMBER THREE:
Business closed for the day? Why not put up a sign - “Open 24 hours a day on the WWW - www.yourcompany.co.uk” Spooners Restaurant (http://www.spooners.co.uk) did this and regularly get table bookings via email that they would usually have missed.