Speaking as a web developer now of almost 10 years I think I can honestly look back at my early years and cringe and shake my head as to how naive I was in my belief that putting your website online will automatically make my website the biggest site on the Internet with lots of traffic and the day I signed up to t-shirt printing company I though “yep I’m going to be millionaire next week”.
Needless to say I’m not a millionaire and my website wasn’t the biggest on the Internet nor did it have traffic flowing to the website in fact, I will be quite honest my website was probably only visited by me and a handful of people that I spoke to on forums. See before a time of Facebook and twitter, and yes there really was such a place, we had to rely heavily on link pages, directories, forums, social bookmarking and goodness knows what else.
Simply putting your website online, is not enough. Over my 10 years of experience I have had people come to me and say why aren’t people buying from my website? Why don’t they send me an e-mail? The answer, because no one knows you are there, its almost like your shouting at the brick wall and hoping people will hear you on the other side and the chances are they won’t.
Putting your website online is brilliant, and it looks amazing to you and possibly to your 1 or 2 robots when they pop over to crawl the website. What no one told you was once its online, then the serious work begins promoting the website day in day out, putting it on everything and near on everywhere, minus the tatoo – unless your in that industry.
Putting the web address on your business cards, promotional material and all manner of physical promotional material is extremely important, it tells the physical world you are also online.
I can already hear the cry, how do we get more traffic online, well that today is a little more easy – get started by making use of Facebook, Twitter and Google+, invite your friend and spend a couple of pennies on an advert on Facebook to increase the people that like your page – perhaps target your demographics etc.
Start carrying out regular keyword research and implementing your keywords in content which is interesting, start being more social by getting involved in forums and including a link in your signature. These are all just some of the ways you can start increasing traffic to your website.
Rome wasn’t built in a day – and your website may have only taken a week or even a month – the hard work has only just begun. Talk to us to find out how we can help get traffic to your website. [email protected]
