The number of visitors coming to your website is directly related to your website promotion and marketing.

The first thing that you should ask yourself if you have a low number of website visitors is– “How much money do I spend, and do I have budgeted, to be spent on website promotion and marketing each month?” If your answer to this is ‘nothing’ then you need to urgently reconsider your commitment to your website!

If you do not promote and market your business then what happens? No new business right?! And eventually no business at all, i.e., the business goes belly up! Well, the same thing happens with a website– no promotion and marketing then no results. And no results generally means that eventually, your website will go belly-up.

You must have at least some budget dedicated to the marketing and promotion of your website. $100 a month? Surely any company that is serious about their website can find a spare $100 to use on website promotion? What about $250, $2,500 or $10,000 a month? The more money that you can allocate to website promotion and marketing, the better.

If you have a successful physical business then chances are that you spend a healthy amount of money each month on the promotion and advertising of your business. Don’t expect miracles from your website. Give it a healthy budget too and the results will follow.

If you have a budget in the $1,000 - $10,000 range, then you should seriously consider employing a professional website marketing and promotions company. Talk to your Zeald Internet consultant for more information.

If you have a very small budget– in the hundreds of dollars a month range, then you are going to have to take a DIY approach. You will need to read the ‘Promote’ module of your E-Business Bible very carefully.

Low or No Budget Promotion Strategies

So how do you promote a website if you have little or no budget? This is a good question. You need to be prepared to work hard! The short list of things we would suggest are:

• Submit your website to the free submission search engines (free)

• Collect customers’ email addresses and send a monthly newsletter or promotion to them every month (free)

• Create some ‘punchy’ classified advertisements for your website– submit them to free classified advertising sites, as listed in the ‘Classified & Banner Advertising’ section of the E-business Bible (free)

• Set up a “Yellow Pages” link from the online Yellow Pages (yellowpages.co.nz) to your website ($25 p/mth)

• Consider advertising your website using the Google Adwords & Overture search engine advertising systems (maximum budget varies and can be set)

• Consider running an advertisement in an ezine that is targeted directly at your target market. (rates will vary depending on ezine)

• Consider signing-up to the NZAds (www.nzads.co.nz) banner exchange network, and start running banner ads on your website (free).

Like with everything, you will need to track and measure each of your different advertising or promotional campaign initiatives very carefully. If it isn’t working, tweak it, or drop it, and give something else a go. If it is working, then try dropping something that is barely working, and use the extra budget to do more of what is working.

Website advertising and promotion can be tricky. Remember the Support Team is there to help you. Don’t hesitate to talk to them for more recommendations and ideas.