Using a website to promote a product or service for your business is the most logical thing to do in our world that is becoming more and more dependent on technology. Marketing on your website is a straightforward and relatively simple. Here are some ideas for website marketing.
Web experts recommend, "For local businesses include the names of the areas that you serve. If someone searches for" Orange County spa "you want to show up in the results even if you are just north of Orange County [For example] 'serving Orange County, Long Beach and the Greater Los Angeles area'. " Consider submitted articles relating to your industry to online directories such as EzineArticles with a link back to your site at the bottom. Or depending you could set up an affiliate program like Amazon has.
Free samples, contests, and other incentives is another idea to direct traffic to you. Once you have links from other sites, whether they are adding your name to local directories, links from articles, et cetera, search engines will find your site and begin reading it. It is unnecessary to pay a company to submit your site to search engines. Directories are different story. Adding your link to various business and categorized directories can be tedious and time consuming, but it does give you results.
Make sure your site design is simple and easy to navigate. Garden.com had a problem with their shopping cart being called a "wheelbarrow" and positioned in their left hand sidebar navigation. Most people who surf the internet look to the upper right corner for a cart or bag symbol and link. Using a design that is distinctly different from the status quo is okay, but it does carry some risk of people not understanding or leaving because they can not find what they want.
Basic design principals such as a "readable font size" and testing your design in a variety of browser and system operations may not be something you feel technologically capable of doing and that's fine, but you need to have someone test your site before launching it. Make sure it loads quickly on various browsers as well. Nothing will chase away users so fast as a slow loading site. A clear "call to action" like "signup for my newsletter" or some strategy of encouraging action from your visitors is a good idea.
