You've Got A Fancy Website, Now What?

Congratulations, you have a great new website. You’re proud because you’ve spent the last several months honing your new company messaging, updating the graphics and ensuring your website contains all of the latest tools and technology, creating fancy new content – and it looks awesome. You should be proud. But unfortunately, the work doesn’t stop there. In fact, just having a great website doesn’t mean a thing if people aren’t coming to it and engaging with it.

So how does your company use your website, arguably one of your top marketing assets, to attract new visitors, engage existing contacts, and educate your target market? Here are a few suggestions from Derek Gehl, contributor at Entrepreneur Magazine (@Entrepreneur) and CEO of an internet marketing firm that has helped thousands of people learn to start and run their own online businesses.

Step 1: Get the traffic you need to test your website fast!

Focus on testing the basics of your site for starters:

Salescopy, especially your headline, benefits, guarantee and call to action

Order process, which needs to be simple enough for a novice web user to place an order

Opt-in offer, so you can determine if you’re successfully capturing your visitors’ contact information

Site navigation, so you can figure out how many clicks it takes to buy. Ideally it should take less than three.

These are the four critical aspects of your sales process that need to be tested before you start driving traffic. Later on, once you’ve generated sales and have some steady traffic, you can move on to testing other parts of your site.

Step 2: Get cheap traffic quickly with PPC advertising

The fastest way to ramp up traffic to your site is to roll out a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign on a larger scale.

This is also a great time to get started with Google AdWords . With Google AdWords, you get instant traffic with zero waiting time. As soon as you put the money down on your keywords, your ad goes up and starts working for you.

Step 3: Get free traffic from search engines like Google

Now that you’ve bid on keywords for a strong showing in the PPC search engines, it’s time to tackle the organic search engines and directories. Search engines like Google and directories like Yahoo! can still be a great source of free traffic for your website. The trick is getting a competitive ranking for your best keywords.

The first step in getting a top ranking in the search engines is to submit or suggest your site to them. In other words, you have to provide them with details about your site. You want to make sure that the “spiders” (which are automated programs that crawl the web indexing sites for the search engines) find your site and include it in the search results.

To submit or suggest your site to the major engines, follow the simple instructions they provide on these pages:

For Google, go to www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

For Yahoo Directory, go to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

For Yahoo! Search, go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com

For MSN, go to http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Step 4: Give away irresistible free content for priceless publicity

Believe it or not, a really easy, frequently undervalued strategy for getting traffic is giving away free content to other websites. Yes, you read that right. Even just two or three well-written articles can generate truckloads of traffic, as long as they don’t contain a sales pitch. You want to include rare, hard-to-get information that’ll lend your articles automatic value – the kind of information that establishes you as an expert in your field.

Once you’ve completed the article, write a short bio paragraph about you and your business and place it at the end of your article along with a link to your site.

Step 5: Get free word of mouth publicity using viral marketing

Simply defined, viral marketing is a way for you to spread your marketing message quickly. You encourage people to pass on information about your site to others, and you use that word-of-mouth publicity to advertise your business. Here are a few simple ideas:

Give away free articles that include a “pass it on” link

Give away free demos of your product

Offer a free trial of your service with a “share this great resource” button on the page

Step 6: Use email marketing to attract repeat visitors

Getting lots of traffic to your site is great, but if you aren’t collecting the contact information (such as the names and email addresses) of visitors, you’re wasting every single click. If visitors leave your site without buying your product, there’s a good chance they won’t ever be back.

Remember: It can take up to seven points of contact to make a single sale, so you’ll want to begin collecting visitors’ contact information from day one using an opt-in form on your home page. Then send them emails to follow up and keep them thinking about your company, your products, and your services. Need some ideas for emails you could send to follow up with your opt-in subscribers? Try these ideas:

Monthly or bi-weekly newsletters that include tons of tips and information

Free reports on topics your market would appreciate

Answers to common questions people ask about your product

Offers for products similar or complementary to ones you may have already offered them

Free product trials that give potential customers a taste of what you have to offer

We love that you’re so excited about your new website – but don’t get too caught up in its beauty without thinking through how you can activate your website to attract the right audience. After all, what good is a beautiful website without any visitors?

Learn how Torchlite can help your company ensure your website and all digital properties are being leveraged to their full extent. Check out a free demo of Torchlite and learn how our industry-trained specialists with proprietary technology can make your digital marketing easier and more effective.