Anyone can build a website. There are tools available to enable the least experienced novice to build an attractive, utile website with little to no training. In fact, one of the major registrars has an advertisement for their template based tool which enables a company to build a "professional website" in twenty minutes.
Unfortunately, if no one knows that your website is there, it is not going to do much good.
There are millions of websites on the worldwide web. Even when you remove the personal sites and the completely distasteful sites, there are still millions of websites out there. In fact, there are so many websites on the worldwide web that we are close to running out of addresses! Chances are, there are thousands that do very much the same thing that your company does, at least in part. How do you let people know about your site? How do you get people to actually visit?
Well, yes... but...
Search engines are a critical part of the equation, but without help, they are not likely to find your website and place it at the top of their list unless you are the only company in the world doing what you do. Massive submissions no longer work, and customers are getting more and more impatient, not going beyond the first couple of pages of search engine listings to find what they are looking for. You need to get your site on those first few pages in order to actually get visitors from the search engines.
Your website must be built with the search engines in mind. Better than 90% of all internet traffic comes from search engines. Your site needs to be optimized to present the engines with the material they need to rank your site highly.
According to Brand Week Online Magazine, "Search engine optimization may be just one part of an online Internet marketing strategy, but it is the fundamental part. It's the baseline. If you are doing nothing else, search engine placement and keyword-related advertising can make up 80 to 90 percent of your traffic."
According to Forrester, "Email marketing has reached mainstream adoption levels — 97% of Interactive Marketing professionals are using or planning to use email in 2007. Despite this near-ubiquity, many marketers have yet to master the basics. And with 72% of consumers deleting most email newsletters without ever opening them, marketers must also look for new ways to make their emails more compelling. " In other words, Email marketing is a valuable tool for building and maintaining relationships with your existing customers or for driving new customers to your business, but there is more to it than building a distribution list in your email client and clicking "send."
You need to start by gathering email addresses. In order to avoid getting blacklisted as a spammer, you need to build your email list as a dedicated effort throughout your day-to-day interactions.
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