How To Advertise Your Website

Your web site marketing strategy is the essential factor that determines the success or failure of a business web site. This is true whether your web site is an extension of an offline business, or you run an completely online business. Web site marketing is unlike any marketing you may have done using other media. However, marketing your web site on the internet shares many common core marketing foundations that underlie your marketing efforts regardless of the media you use. I am a strong believer that for a small business, all marketing should be based on the old direct marketing mantra of attention, interest, desire, and action. In this article I am going to discuss those aspects in terms of how they crucial in marketing your web site on the internet.

In whatever venue you market, it is necessary to draw in prospective customers or the net effect is zero. For any business of any kind, marketing means visibility. Online, businesses ordinarily assess the success of being visible by the amount of traffic flow to the website, visitor "click" counts demonstrating who sees the wares. But actual content in a given website is only a small part of what really draws traffic. To maximize the number of hits on your website, you have two potential means to grab the attention of possible customer, and these are simple. You can work to put yourself out there by website strategies, or you can buy attention by paying for advertising and promotion.

On the internet earning your traffic results in you being found in what are called the 'free' or 'organic' search results on the major search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo. When your prospective customers do a search on terms of interest to them using one of the major search engines they will be presented with a list of web pages found that the search engine believes is the most relevant to them. These are the 'free' or 'organic' results. They will also see ads, but that will be discussed below. Many people are under the assumption that the highest raking results they get on a search engine are the 'best' in some way. In this game it really is winners take all! If you are not on the first page of results the attention you attract is greatly diminished. In fact, if you don't make it to the second page of results, then you often might as well not even be in the listings at all because folks usually won't search past the second page at most. This type of web site marketing is often referred to as 'search engine optimization.' You can hire a search engine marketing firm or learn how to do it yourself. Winning at this game is not rocket science, but it is part science and part art that requires a constant work and attention to maintain your success.

Buying your traffic on the internet is usually done by purchasing some form of advertising from someone who already has high traffic to their web site or email contact list. The most widely used forms of advertising are the banner advertisement and text advertisements. Banner advertisements were all the rage when the internet first became popular. However, their effectiveness diminished greatly to a point where many people began to see them as a waste of money. However, they can be used effectively as long as you have a plan and clearly track your return on investment. More common now are text advertisements which were largely brought into the forefront by Google. You can see Google text advertisements on their search results pages and on millions of individual web sites across the internet. If you want to generate traffic fast, and are willing to pay the money to do so, text advertisement are the most popular method. Google, MSN, and Yahoo are the major players in this market, but Google is still clearly the big dog in this pack.

As you can see your web site marketing strategy must first be focused on getting attention. Attention first requires that someone is exposed to your message. You can earn the exposure, you can buy it, or like many businesses you can do both. Earning the attention is a long term focus and requires skill and consistent commitment of resources. However, it pays off almost indefinitely and likely much cheaper in the long run than buying it. Buying the attention is much faster to get results and allows you to test ideas without committing the resources to earn attention. Any comprehensive web site marketing strategy is likely to include both methods.

You can get more information about Business Marketing at http://www.BizRave.com . Eric Menzies writes about Fastest Way To Increase Page Rank and other topics.