Driving new custom to a website

dizzyblnd

All of you computer people out there, I'm in need of some advice. I have a very small company that I have started recently, and have created a website for said company. However, I dont know any quicl/ cheap or effective ways of getting people to look at the website, in order to use my services. Does anyone have anyideas they would be kind enough to share with me? I am open to ideas, I have time to put into advertising and I am relatively computer literate.

Hope someone can help...

InsideInsurance

Sounds a little bit like you've put the cart before the horse. When you were designing and developing the site, how did you plan to drive visitors to the site and ensure a high conversion rate to "using" the service??

What is "the service"?

Long term you need to work on your Search Engine Optimisation, assuming you did it properly when you built the site then its more of a maintenance job on the site and continuous link building off the site.

Short to mid term you've got advertising (eg Adwords) and social media etc. Exactly how you use the later depends on what your offering is. Ideally with advertising you link payment to sales rather than visitors but that requires your site to be able track from click to purchase and for advertisors to have faith both in your ability to sell and your ability/ honest to track

shmeeko69

dizzyblnd wrote: »

All of you computer people out there, I'm in need of some advice. I have a very small company that I have started recently, and have created a website for said company. However, I dont know any quicl/ cheap or effective ways of getting people to look at the website, in order to use my services. Does anyone have anyideas they would be kind enough to share with me? I am open to ideas, I have time to put into advertising and I am relatively computer literate.

Hope someone can help...

If you don't want to pay for traffic then, you have to compete for the top 10 spots on Google for natural searches. The process is called SEO or search engine optimisation. You should choose sensible keyword phrases that have low competition and start trying to rank highly in the main search engines through quality backlings, bookmarks and having the keywords not only in your title tags and website description, but sprinkled through your web content.

Best of Luck

dizzyblnd

Thank you to both of you, I think I understand how to do the things you have suggested. The company is providing foam flower arrangements. I thought I should have a website before I started advertising as the company is based on an online shop and without the website I had no way of selling the items I produce. A while back I see a post on here from someone about advertising on twitter and facebook but I cannot find the post now. Any ideas?
Also you mentioned adwords, how do I go about doing this?

Hoody

Adwords can work but there are things you have to bear in mind as far as their long term usage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/business/smallbusiness/as-pay-per-click-ad-costs-rise-small-businesses-search-for-alternatives.html?hpw&_r=1&

InsideInsurance

AdWords is googles advertising program (see https://www.google.co.uk/adwords)

You evidently need a site before actually advertising but you should have an advertising plan and business case that form part of your business plan before you have a website.

With adwords or any other content sensitive pay per click or pay per impression advertising you need to spend time:

a) Doing your research costings
b) Ensuring your site is correctly set up
c) Ensure you can track people from ad -> sale

For research, look at the options of what words to target, for example an estimate of the cost per click is:

Flowers: £1.03
Flower Arrangements: £0.52
Artificial Flowers: £0.35
Foam Flowers: £0.28
Foam Flower Arrangements: £0.28

As well as the price there is also an estimate of the number of searches done; 1,600 UK searches a month for Foam Flowers and 60,500 for Artificial Flowers

So which terms do you target? Is it worth paying the extra 7p to appear to people searching for artificial flowers given they may want foam or they may want silk but there are massively more of them?


For setup you need to put people closest to where they want to be.... if they search for "buy foam roses" you really want them to land on the page full of roses and not other flowers and ideally remove a lot of the other navigation from that page because you know they want to buy rather than wanting to know how they're made etc but they may be distracted.

If you decided you wanted to target not just those wanting to buy immediately (eg going for the term "what are foam flowers") then you land them on a relevant page but ensure the rest of the normal navigation is there so they can go on and find your products and hopefully buy or sign up to a news letter etc


Finally on tracking, you evidently need to be able to track the success rate so you can then calculate your return on investment, do A/B testing to see which landing pages work better etc

dizzyblnd

Are there no 'free' options to advertise on too? I want to get a wide base for advertising, as my target audience is obviously quite specialised.

Been_a_Crazy_Fool

This site could be of use to you!...http://www.socialtrafficpower.co.uk/

Good Luck!

dizzyblnd

thanks charlievald, hadn't thought about google maps. Already on ebay and will research amazon now...

scaredofdebt

Depending on your market you can generate traffic via Twitter and Facebook for free.

LinkedIn provides advertising that can be very effective as it can be targeted very specifically.

dizzyblnd

scaredofdebt how would i do this? This is exactly what i want to do but dont know where to start?
shmeeko69 i have researched adwords and llow competition words but now need guidance what to do with it and from reading many of your posts you seem quite the expert.
I know that the type of business I am beginning will rely largely on local trade, any ideas how to advertise locally?