Tuesday, November 27, 2007

What is the Purpose of your Website?

There are millions and millions of business Websites on the Internet, and I'm continually surprised by how many were apparently put up without any thought about what was trying to be achieved.

I say this because many are obviously nothing more than online brochures for the business products or services. These treat the Internet the same way as hard-print advertising or collateral materials.

Other business sites are designed for the Internet but are not optimized for search engines. Many also lack a means of capturing sales leads and hard to navigate. Kinda makes me wonder what they were hoping to achieve...

The first and most important step in launching any Website is to define its purpose and goals. Is it to be a reference site? A customer support site? Or, do you want an online marketing machine? The answer determines the resultant site design and content. Conversely, failure to address this subject before building a site will inevitably lead to frustration and expensive site revamping.

So, what do you want your site to do? Is it accomplishing this? Need help?

Monday, November 12, 2007

Market your Website with Free Articles

One of the most inexpensive means of promoting your Website is to create and distribute free articles on the Internet. There are a half-dozen major sites that are dedicated to this purpose and the best part is that is FREE!

And the articles do not have to be long - three or four paragraphs will do. Write about something you know. Keep it narrowly focused and related to the service or product you offer on your Website. Include an author box with an embedded link back to your site. That way, interested readers can go directly to your site to learn more. Articles are a great sales lead generator!

Moreover, free articles get widespread distribution on the Internet. They are picked up by other blogs, Websites and newsletters for content. So, your free article (with its embedded link back to your site) results in an explosion of one-way links back to your site and considerable traffic boost.

There's nothing not to like about using free article distribution as a means to improve your Website traffic and search engine ranking. Contact us if you need help getting this going.