Website Marketing


Most business owners will tell you that without marketing, businesses will not work at all -- let alone realize their full potential. This article explores some tips to make your website more than just an expensive ornament.

1000 Words are Worth More than 1 Picture


In many cases, businesses who hire web design firms to make websites for them end up with nice looking sites.  Expensive design firms tend to use more graphics on websites they produce. The more money you spend, the more visually attractive and compelling the site can be (although this is not always the case).  The reason for this is that for these high-end design companies, a website is a piece of art -- and lots of time is spend hand-crafting each fine detail into perfection.

This approach works IF you're not hoping to have new customers learn about you via the web.

However -- few of us have the advantage of working under a "household name" brand like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, or Apple.  These companies know that people who are looking for their site will simply type in "company.com" to get their site.  Their existing brand awareness (often produced by many years of VERY expensive advertising) affords them this luxury.

The rest of us have brands like "Al's Auto Repair," "Quik-Kleen Housekeeping Service," or "Heartfelt Custom Greetings." These are our blood-sweat-and-tears businesses that -- wether generations old or fresh startups -- simply arn't stuck in people's mind like the big brands do.  So what good is a website for us "little guys?"  How do people who know nothing about us find us?

Well, when you're looking for something on the Internet, where do you go?  Probably to a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN.  So the way for small companies to "get found" on the web is by being listed with search engines -- to get people looking for "Atlanta Auto Body," "Chicago Housekeeping Service," or "handmade greeting cards" clicking on your site.

Here's the secret -- for the most part, search engines don't care one bit about graphics.  In fact, if one of those $20,000 custom designed art-websites site is 80% graphics, the search engines will see only the 20% that isn't graphics, because they only really see text.

This is where your small business can get a real edge on the companies with big marketing budgets.  While they spend hundreds of man-hours pricing and researching the right company to craft their 5 or 6 figure art-site (why commission an expensive piece of art that's outdated in 3 years anyway), you can spend a few nights writing 5 to 10 articles about your business or related topics. These need not be long essays -- one or at most two pages is optimal.

Here are the some things to remember when writing content for your small business website:
  • DO write with "key words" in mind
    These are the words that you think people will type in when they are searching for your kind of business
  • DON'T EVER COPY AND PASTE text from other sites
    Search engines are better than freshman college professors at finding plagarists and they will "fail" you for it!
  • Choose the URL names of your articles carefully with keywords in mind
  • Continually add new articles to your site -- search engines love updates just as much as they love text.
  • Find a web based tool that lets you edit your site's content without relying on a webmaster to make updates for you.
Site Build It! goes beyond most online "make your own website" type tools and actually equips you to succeed online through marketing tools and monetization techniques.