+ RSSWebsite Marketing: What You Ought To Understand Before Beginning (Part 4)
Part 4 of 4. Once you've designed your website, chosen an appropriate domain name and selected a web host that meets your needs, you then put the website in place on the host. When everything is in place and linked together, customers can enter your business's domain name into their address bar and learn all about what your business has to offer. This, broadly speaking, is how a website marketing strategy works.
Customers view your website in their browsers, accessing the interlinked network of pages, images and other multimedia content you've created to market your business. This information, stored at your hosting company, is delivered to the customer via the web servers the host runs on your behalf.
More often than not, the customer views your site in a commonly available browser such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera, but other ?user agents? are also becoming more common. By interconnecting pages locally and worldwide using hyperlinks, many of which include domain names, customers can ?surf the web,? easily connecting to sites across the globe.
To find a Webpage, you can always type the domain name into the address field of your browser such as "ebay.com". But what if you don't know the address? Or what if you want to find all Websites on a specific topic? If you don't know the address then how can you get there?
It was this problem which search engines were created to address. Many such engines exist, of which Google, Yahoo! And Bing (formerly MSN Live) are the most influential. Because many users turn to these three engines for their online search needs, many webmasters make them key players in their website marketing strategies. Inclusion in all of these engines generates a great deal of free traffic which, in turn, translates into profit.
Additionally, consider using email to market your Website and business. Email is "a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over the internet. Email predates the Internet [and was a crucial technology in its creation.
Email was quickly extended and became a highly useful tool for the online marketers because it costs nothing to send. Plus, an auto-responder system only costs a few bucks a month and makes it's very easy to build a list of current or potential clients. When you have a list like this, you can then email them automatically with special offers, send them a newsletter and keep you at the top of their mind.
And keeping you at the top of their mind is important to your "viral" success. Take our business, for example, we have a free weekly newsletter that we send out (sign up yourself) to current and potential clients. This gains the trust of our readers such that when people ask them for a Website design or SEM company, they frequently recommend us. To be sure, about 40% of our traffic comes from the three major search engines but the other 60% comes from thousands of other sites, from our newsletter or from our newsletter being forwarded to others. Be sure to check out Parts 1-3.
