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Is
your Business Website Lonely?
3
tips to help your small business grow online
Many
people launch their online business or online presence
for their bricks and mortar small businesses with
completely overblown expectations. What they don’t
often realize is that while there are over 1 billion
people online, there are also millions and millions of
websites vying for their attention. Simply having a
website is not enough to generate traffic. You
must promote your site as much as possible to encourage
people to visit your website. It’s similar to throwing
a party but forgetting to invite anyone. You can pour
the drinks and lay out the nachos, but if nobody knows
about the party, you’ll have a pretty lonely evening.
To beat
the loneliness that some businesses feel online, here
are 3 low cost tips to draw some people to your website:
Write
about your Topic: What is your website about? What
are you selling? Whatever it is, you should be able to
come up with a few ideas for articles that will be of
interest to your audience and will establish your
credibility in the field. By writing short 500-word
articles and circulating them on the Internet, you’ll
pick up some free traffic to your website. You
accomplish this by remembering to add a resource box, or
a byline at the end of your article. It might read
something like “Joe Smith is the owner of www.bestplumbinginventionever.com
where he offers his revolutionary new plumbing products
for sale”. The article in this case probably had
something to do with a challenge facing the plumbing
profession, hence the readers were mostly plumbers. Joe
essentially gets a free advertisement in his byline that
is attached to his informative article.
Remember,
it's quality over quantity when it comes to online
articles. Good material focused on a particular audience
will be welcomed and will drive quality backlinks for
your site. Poor quality articles, published on low
ranking websites, will not do much to generate web
traffic.
Exchange
Links: Links from other websites can be a
substantial source of web traffic for your site. Not
only will the links generate traffic for you, but
inbound links are one of the key factors evaluated by
search engines in determining the ranking of your
website. Again, the key to linking is to go for quality, not
quantity. Most search engines are now evaluating
websites based on their relevant inbound links, meaning
that a link from a webpage that has nothing to do with
your business (i.e. a pool table company that links to
your pet nutrition website) won’t do you much good.
The best approach is to locate related businesses who
are not competitors and approach them with an offer to
link to their site in exchange for a link from yours. A
good example would be a pool table company that links to
a website belonging to a website about party games or
pub games. The topics are related, but the sites are not
likely in competition with one another.
Study
your Competitors : Do a quick search on Google for a common search term
applicable to your business. For example, a pool table
company should search for “pool table sales”. Now
look at the top 10 results. Your objective is to
determine what these companies are doing to be
successful in gaining such a high ranking in a Google
search. Read their website thoroughly. Are they posting
articles on other websites? If so, find out which ones
so you can evaluate the possibility of posting your
articles there as well. What about inbound links? Who is
linking to your competitors? (you can find this out by
typing “link:www.yourcompetitorsname.com”). Why are
these sites linking to your competition? Can you get a
link from these sites as well? By studying the key
success factors of high ranking sites in your industry,
you’ll unlock some great leads for you to investigate
in the quest to drive your site up to the top of the
search engine ladder.
Through
informative article writing, inbound link building, and
an analysis of competing websites, you can beat that
lonely feeling you get when nobody visits your website.
Keep working at raising your online profile and maybe
next time you throw a party, the whole neighborhood will
show up!
Article
contents © 2007 by marketingyoursmallbusiness.com
Will
Dylan is the Author of “Small Business Big
Marketing” a powerful e-book for small businesses
available through his website www.marketingyoursmallbusiness.com
. You can contact Will at askwill@marketingyoursmallbusiness.com
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