Marketing a Website Takes Work

08/15/2006

Being someone who markets websites constantly, I’m always thinking about how to get more traffic, better search engine placement, more inbound links, better features, more optimized code, etc. It’s natural to me.

What I don’t understand are people who don’t understand what purpose a website serves, and how it can really help them if they put some effort into it.

It seems to me that most website owners today think that just having a website is good enough. But they rarely take that next step in logic and ask themselves what purpose their website is serving for them. In all but the rarest of cases, a website exists to serve people. So in order for a website to serve it’s purpose, you must continually attract new website visitors, as well as retain old ones.

Now where the real disconnect happens. How do these people expect to get these visitors to the site? I think they believe there is some magic process by which a website is created, and instantly people will find their site. Search engines will rank them well. It all just happens, right?

Wouldn’t that be nice. But of course just as with everything else in business, it comes down to competition. If it was as easy as just setting up a website, and waiting for the traffic to flow in, then everyone would do it. And the fact is that everyone has done it. So your site is probably competing against hundreds or thousands of other similar sites.

So how does one get ahead of all of these competing websites? Well, doing nothing will result in nothing. If you take no action, or spend no resources to attract new visitors, then you will get nothing. So you must take some sort of action.

Of course the action to be taken varies greatly with each situation. And it varies as time passes, and your website evolves, and you reap the benefits of the past improvements you’ve made to attract traffic.

To know what this action is definitely takes skill and experience. For those who have time, patience, and the ability to adapt, you can probably find a way to increase your web traffic. For those who would rather spend their time on their business, paying someone else to do it for you is probably best.

Promoting your website can be a lot of work. Some of that work, such as getting links or directory submissions, may be one time effort. Once you have the link or the submission, hopefully you will have it indefinitely. So you can spend your time getting additional links and submissions.

Other tasks are recurring. For example analyzing your traffic patterns, making adjustments, updating your marketing strategies and your website content, etc. To be truly successful you will not want to ignore this on-going effort.

So what does this all mean to us as website owners? If you make no effort to promote your website, define goals, create action plans to achieve those goals, follow through with your action plan, measure your results, analyze your plan, and make adjustments, then how can you expect your website to get any visitors?

Marketing a website takes resources. Whether those resources are your time, or budget to hire a professional web marketer. If you put nothing in, you will get nothing out.