Website promotion should be your lowest cost marketing channel

[web marketing]

Website promotion covers all those online activities that can help drive traffic to your website. I do not include traditional offline marketing channels. You will of course adapt all your literature and adverts at least to include a mention of your website. The more options you give your customers the better.

First, you must optimise your site for the search engines. Simply making your site easy to index by the search engines and focused on relevant keywords will bring you some traffic. However just being indexed is a long way from being near the top of the index for the majority of competitive keywords. But why pay to get traffic that you can otherwise obtain for free?

The next stage is to make sure your site is seen by as many as possible of your target market who are actively searching for your product or service on the web.

Pay per Click advertising
This is the tool you used for your test market. It can ensure you are always visible on the first page of results. Therefore it should continue to be used as long as there is proven short term profitability.

Link Popularity
Once the website optimisation is completed with all the on-page factors in place, the search engines have to be persuaded not just to index the page but to rank it higher than most of its peers. One of the key factors in achieving this is to create incoming links from other web sites which are taken as a vote of confidence in the receiving site.

Email
Email is the most used form of communication on the internet. Provided you use it properly and avoid spamming, it is a very valuable way of keeping in contact with customers and prospects who may not yet be ready to order but are important to your future.