Ok, you have a website, but now you want people to find it.

Working Planet can advise you on the most effective way to promote your site.

Marketing your website

Before you engage your marketing strategy we need to work out what type of person is going to be accessing your site, then we need to decide what will be the best way to let them know how to find you.

Define your business/activity

Who are you? Why are you important? What value can you provide to your users?

Define your target market

Who are you trying to reach and how do they use the Internet? Do they use search engines? Do they use review sites? Do they talk about products they’re interested in through social media sites like Twitter? What times of the day are they most active online? Once you’ve figured this out, go to the places where they’ll be and stay there. Twitter and Facebook are great, but if your market doesn’t know what tweeting is, this probably won’t be an effective option.

Engage your audience

This is paramount when you are developing the content for your site. Always keep in mind your audience. Talk with them, not at them. Try to develop content that is at a level appropriate for your audience. Try to present yourself as a real person who can provide a genuine service.

Be authoritative

Know your product or service well and try to produce content that reflects latest developments in your sector.

Measure

Develop a strategy that will provide you with feedback about how your internet presence is performing. Google provide a comprehensive set of tools that can help you to identify if your strategies are effective and reaching the right audience. Working Planet will help you set up and monitor how your website is performing. The following are a range of strategies that can be employed, some cost money, but others just require a bit of effort.

Search Engines

Around 60%-70% of all traffic on the Internet comes from search engines. But to be useful your website is going to need to appear high in search engine rankings, preferably in the first 10. There are two ways that your site can appear in search engines. These are organic (unpaid) results and paid results.

Organic Search Engine Results

These results appear in the larger column of the page and probably account for most of the results that you click on. You do not need to pay the search engines any money to rank in the organic search results. Instead, the search engines list relevant sites based on how much of an authority they feel that particular web page is. The better the content that you generate for your site, the better chance you have of being ranked highly.

Google, the main player in the search engine game, uses it’s PageRank algorithm (which is updated a little each day, sometimes more than once) while other popular search engines use similar ranking algorithms. A process called SEO (search engine optimisation) is a service that Working Planet can provide to help improve your ranking in organic searches.

Paid Search Engine Results

Paid search engine results are located at the top of the listings and on the right sidebar of the Google results pages. These links are commonly referred to as “sponsored links”. Google Adwords is a popular paid service. You pay a certain fee every time your link is clicked. This is known as “pay per click”. You need to bid for keywords or phrases that you think people might use when searching for you. The higher you bid (the higher the amount that you’re willing to pay per click), the better your chance of getting a higher ranking.

Google and Yahoo both use a ranking algorithm for their sponsored links. You rank based on the perceived quality of your website. So even if you are paying the most money for each click for a specific term, you still might not rank at the top. The content that you have written for your site is extremely important for improving your chances.

People using search engines tend to be biased toward clicking on links from organic results. Only around 20% of users click on sponsored links, so you need to consider whether spending money here is really going to improve marketing.

Email Marketing

By placing a newsletter sign up box on your site, you give your visitors the opportunity to be alerted to new products or services, sale items or important information about you. When someone fills out this opt-in form, they have to include their email. This form of marketing is usually tied in with an email campaign service like Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp. This marketing method works well because it generates a list of people who are genuinely interested in hearing more from you because they have signed up themselves.

Conversion rates are the highest with email marketing because you’re sending emails to people that are interested in your product. Working Planet have many years of experience setting up and integrating email marketing services.

Social Media

Social media sites like facebook, Twitter and Google+ are a great way to gain attention and to reach more targeted customers. Exposure through social media sites can feel more personal. Try to offer useful information and content on your social media sites. Be creative, be an authority, and most importantly, be a real person.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites allow users to save, organize and share links to websites. You have the ability to save web pages just like you bookmark websites within your browser. When you save a link to a web page, you can give it tags so other users can find it. You can also share it, rank it and allow others to rank it. The idea is that the best web pages will get the highest ranks, thus giving them a better opportunity to be read and shared even further.

Social bookmarking can still be a nice way to gain traffic and subscribers if you use it properly.

Display Ads

They show up on sites in the form of block advertisements and typically can be seen stretching down sidebars and sometimes across the top of web pages. You either pay an advertising platform or a single website some sort of fee (per click , per impression or sometimes monthly or weekly rates) and your ad can be displayed on their website or targeted websites. Banner ads are not that good for generating traffic, but can be good for branding, getting yourself recognised. Pay per click advertising is generaaly better value than banner ads.

Affiliate Marketing

You arrange for a third party site to promote your service or product in exchange for a commission every time a customer that they send to your website purchases your product or signs up for your service. How this works is you sign up for some sort of affiliate platform (the network). They take care of all the payment issues and setting up your desired commission rates. This will probably cost you a monthly fee. Within this network are merchants that have the opportunity to sign up with you to promote your products.
You don’t pay any affiliate until someone they’ve referred has purchased your product.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is set to be one of the most important subsets of Internet marketing. Mobile promotion is promotion via mobile phones or other mobile devices. Mobile marketing could also include the following things:

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is marketing through text messages. Marketers can use an opt-in method to collect a list of mobile phone numbers from potential customers.

QR Codes

QR codes look similar to bar codes. They can be placed anywhere offline or online. When a user finds one (whether it’s on a business card, brochure or anywhere else) they can take a picture of it with their mobile phone and then be taken to a link provided by that company.

Blogging

Maintaining a blog as part of your site, provides an oportunity for you to publish new content often. This can help to build your ranking with search engines. It can also give your potential customers a reason to return to your site, especially if you publish useful or entertaining content. All Working planet content managed websites include a built in blogging option.

Offline Marketing

Even if your entire business is online, you can still get value and return on your investment from using offline marketing methods for promotion. This includes all the traditional marketing methods you can think of – print, TV, radio, word of mouth, networking and even some more creative and direct ways for customers to interact with you or your product directly in real life.

Working Planet offers a competitive service in all types of print material, including, brochures ,flyers, booklets, print advertisements. Take a look at some of print work – link to print work