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Once your website is up and running, marketing it becomes vital. "Build it and they will come" rarely works online. In most cases you will have quite a bit of competition and you need to get your name out there to get visitors.
Obviously, you will want to market your website online. There are many ways to do this. One of the most popular is pay per click advertising. The best search engines for pay per click advertising are Google and Yahoo Search . These two companies drive much of the pay per click advertising out there and have the best reputations.
Advertising in relevant ezines can also be quite effective. The best way to handle this is to look up ezines which target your market and find out what it takes to advertise in them. Rates vary tremendously, but so does responsiveness. Try to get a solo ad or a top sponsor ad for the best visibility.
Search engine optimization is quite important and time consuming. Natural rankings in search engines are extremely valuable, as it doesn't matter how many people visit your site; the rankings themselves cost you nothing. Getting there can be expensive if you hire an outside firm, however.
One of the basic steps you can take for search engine optimization is to get a good number of links pointing to your website. Ideally, these should also be attractive to potential visitors.
One tactic that I have found to work fairly well is to join Digital Point's Ad Co-op. This is free; all you have to do is add the code to every page on your site or a directory within your site. You get approximately as much back as you get in, depending on how many pages you have ranked in Google and the PageRank of your main page. This keeps anyone from cheating by artificially increasing their number of page views, which is a common problem in other ad exchanges.
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You can also spend time writing and submitting articles for other websites to use. Articles should not simply be a sales letter; they should be about something that will interest your target audience, and ideally make them want to visit your site. Save the sales efforts for your website. Expect anyone who uses your articles to include a live link to your website. Sometimes the articles will appear only in a newsletter, but often they will be included on a website, which means more links to your site. In either case, articles can build your reputation as well as your backlinks.
You can also take the time to do link exchanges. Have pages on your site dedicated to links to other websites. It is most effective if you organize by theme, and only accept links from themed pages as well. This improves the odds that a visitor will actually look at your link, after all, who is going to browse through a random listing to find your site?
Even though your website is online, you should not limit your marketing efforts to online alone. Take advantage of places to advertise offline to bring in people who wouldn't look for your site otherwise. Pamphlets, brochures, flyers and business cards are all relatively inexpensive. Find places where you can put your ads around your community.
Advertising in other media, such as television, radio and newspapers is another possibility. You will want to research the feasibility of such advertising for your business. Some of these can add up quite rapidly, and it takes several exposures (many say 7) to get someone interested in your product, so keep your budget firmly in mind.
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