There is a naive thought amongst many business owners that if they build a good web site to promote their bricks and mortar business, the masses to will come to visit. It is true there are millions, if not billions of searches undertaken every day, however, the majority are probably not interested in what have to say.
Don’t let that put you off. You don’t want millions of visitors every day anyway. Your site would most likely get closed down for exceeding bandwidth. However, you do want visitors; quality visitors who are there because they are interested in what you have to say, or what you have to offer. Mind you – if they don’t know you exist you wont get any visitors, unless someone accidentally stumbles across your site.
Like any business, online – offline or both; you need to promote, promote and promote some more. Long term promotion takes the form of SEO – or in layman’s terms, making your site popular within the search engines. When someone enters a search term that relates to your business, your site appears in the search results. We have plenty of articles on SEO if you need more information.
Other forms of promotion include offline; for example, including your URL in letter heads and business cards. Online promotion includes pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and social marketing.
You can build the best temple in the world, if you don’t tell the masses it exists, it will stay empty for ever. Internet marketing is simply promoting your web site to the rest of the world – online and offline.
