Tips, Tricks and Tools

Get those visitors to come back

Marketing your site...
One of the many places to go to find out more about how to market your website is the search engines themselves. They have literally 1,000's of links to places which help you market your company on the net. Beside that "shotgun" approach, you may try to learn aout marketing to your visitors in any number of ways. The most important rule in marketing to remember:

        GIVE your visitors a reason to come back!

Too many sites spend all their effort to promote their company and not enough about what the visitor cares about. Sure a company bio page gets visits, but you can bet, a page which directly impacts a customers curiosity will get a heck of a lot more traffic. Positioning your products or services in the best light possible is the objective of marketing. Whether that's related to promoting your site in advertising, performing charitable work in the community, or forming alliances, the objective remains the same. Get your name (site) out there and generate a positive impression.

        Do market research!

You can spend a good deal of effort getting your site out in front of millions of people, but if you don't give them what they want, you end up like many of the dot-coms which sprung for Superbowl advertising. Do some market research and find out what your visitors like / dislike. Get them to tell you what they want to see, and put as much of that into your site.

• Provide a page for your online customers which has a 3-5 question survey on it. The questions should be deisgned to give you feedback on their likes / dislikes and what they want to see on your site. Encourage participation by explaining how the information will be used to build or add services for them.
  
  
• Put together a collection of suggestions and post them for others to review as well as a link to add a comment. Be sure to use a tool which will enable you to edit offensive or undesirable comments.



• Have a referral program. why should someone tell others about your site other than to be a "nice visitor? They need encouragement, so create a program where _ % or _ $ of every sale goes to _ _ _ charity or wherever.

Not knowing what your competition is doing on a regular basis will put you behind in the quest for visitors. You can be sure your competitors are trying to influence the same visitors /customers you are. If they have a wildly successful new offering, how are you going to find out abou it, and more importantly when?

Use the search engines like AltaVista or FAST to locate competitors who provide similar products and services as you. Identify the competitor which poses the most significant threat, and monitor their activities. Their web site is a great place for this information.

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