Now that your site's up, what next? Depending on what kind of site you had built, a website is usually something like a brochure or a store or a club. You have to decide what you want it to do for you before you have it made. There are plenty of sites on the web, how do you get people to notice yours?

Marketing is the art of communicating. An important part of that art is communicating your product or service to your public: the people who need and want it. The internet has its own unique lines and channels of communication, which provide new opportunities for helping your public find you and the products and services they need.

Just like real brochures, your brochure site won't pass itself out to your potential public. Just like a real store or club, if you build it, they won't come unless you tell them it's there. Unlike a real brochure, a brochure site can be "passed out" to hundreds of millions of people, over and over and over, at almost no cost to you. Your virtual store or club-style social network has access to clients and public all over the world which you could never reach at your brick and mortar location. You just have to find them and let them know you're there.

If you want people to come to your site, your site needs marketing. We know how to get you noticed, communicate YOUR product to YOUR public, get search engines to come looking for your site and get your site noticed.

So what is marketing on the internet?

The first step for any site, after you've decided what kind of site you want, is identifying who your public(s) are, then finding them online. Next comes a marketing plan, based on your budget and your marketing goals: how can your goals best be achieved on your budget? Just a few of the many tools available to market your site can include:

  • Paid ad placements. You buy an ad on a search engine or website, just like buying an ad in the paper, phone book or magazine. You'll need to find the right sites, find out what their traffic is (how many people view their site) and whether what they want to charge is a reasonable rate for that website. This may be a monthly charge, a flat rate for a specified period of time or a pay-per-click ad where a fee is charged for each click on your ad. Internet ad fees are still mainly well below print and broadcast ad fees, and have the potential to reach a much greater number of people.

  • Keywords: common search terms placed in the code for your website which are indexed by search engines like google, yahoo, etc. Your web designer codes these into your site pages while the site is being built or they can be added later. Deciding on the correct search terms to use as your keywords should be part of a targeted marketing plan, in order to avoid wasting search opportunities on terms that either don't get searched or bring the wrong public to your site.

  • Link building. Link building is creating incoming links to your site on other sites, whether they are just an inbound link from another website or a reciprocal link your site trades with another site. What kind of links are built and how they're built depends on the type of site, the product or industry the site's product or industry and how much effort and committment are put into link building. There are many, many ways to build links. The better quality the link, the more traffic it can bring a site.

Besides the few examples above, there are many, many, MANY marketing opportunities available on line, depending on the type of site, its product and industry.

What we can do for you.

We know how to use all the avenues and we've been doing it for years. Rather than pouring years of your life into learning this by trial and error in your "spare" time (and all the rest of your time), let us do it for you.

Whether your budget and goals are listings or a single ad in your local area, an online press campaign and paid ads or a full virtual community based around your industry, we've done it and we know how to create it for you.

  • We can help you choose the best keywords for your site and avoid terms that bring people who really won't be interested in your product, so obscure no one ever searches for them or so common that they bring everyone and waste your money.

  • We build links that improve search engine ranking, not trash it.

  • We do the footwork on paid ad placement, so your ad money isn't wasted on sites that don't get traffic, get only traffic irrelevant to you, don't run your ad enough to make a difference or bury it where no one sees it.

  • We can find the directories and places on line to list your site that are relevant to your site.

  • We can build electronic press kits or even run a full, on-line press campaign.

  • We create innovative methods to promote your site, tailored to the site's message.

Not everything works for every site. We'll meet with you to determine what you want and what you can put into creating it, then help you find the right strategy for your site and we won't waste your time and money on strategies that are just not right for your site and your product.