Now that you have your information all assembled and ready
to sell, you know how you are going to sell it, and have worked
hard to set up your shop, you are nearly ready to go and it
is finally time to put the “now open” sign up!
But before we do, I want to make a quick but very important
online marketing strategy distinction for you.
There are MANY ways to get traffic to your website, but each
and every one of these ways fall into one of two categories.
The first group consists of visitors that enter a site directly.
These visitors come across a web address in a TV or radio
commercial, newspaper ad, or some other type of conventional
advertising which announces the business’s domain (web
address). They either saw or heard the web address for this
company (like amazon.com), they then typed it into their browser
and went directly to that company’s website. We’ll
call this type of access to a website direct entry.
The other type of visitor finds a company’s website
via some sort of referral. This means that this kind of visitor
either stumbled across a link on another website or actually
conducted a search on a search engine looking specifically
for this type of information, and found a link to the site
there. Unlike the first group who manually entered the url
(uniform resource locator … an exact address to the
desired page such as “http://e-vantagepoint.com/sitebody/resources.htm”)
of the website into their browser and went to the website
directly, this second group was directed to the destination
website by another referring page. We will call this type
of access referral based.
The reason that this distinction is so important is that
any company or business that utilizes a website for a good
portion of their business will usually focus on one of the
two methods of increasing their traffic. Usually larger companies
with lots of money to burn focus primarily on the direct entry
method, inundating their audience with their brand name and
web address. They use costly TV, radio, and print advertising
and marketing campaigns to gain brand recognition and get
their message out to millions of viewers. It is a very expensive
method, usually not practical for the small business or new
business, but it isn’t necessarily more effective either.
The return on investment for this marketing approach is much
lower than some other approaches. This type of campaign is
usually thrown in front of a huge general audience at a high
cost and, because the audience is typically both so large
and so broad in scope, the typical response to the direct
entry campaign is much smaller pecentage in proportion to
its audience than a referral based marketing approach. More
expensive does not equal better results in the case of marketing
online.
The referral based method is far less expensive and, depending
on the company or product, can be a far more effective method
especially considering how much less it typically costs when
compared to the direct entry method. This method includes
everything from good old word of mouth to a link from another
website (like a banner ad) to a referral
from a search engine. Even though this method doesn’t
put your message and your product in front of the millions
that a direct entry method does, the people that it does reach
are far more qualified customers in that they are already
more likely to be interested in or even ready to buy your
product now. This is HUGE! The chances are typically very
good that the referral based customers are already looking
for what you are offering and are much more prepared to spend
their money! Because the individuals that a referral based
marketing approach target are more likely to be interested
in what you are offering, there isn’t the same need
to be seen by millions.
For this reason the less expensive referral based approach
is often far more practical for the home-based online business.
It produces more conversions by far. Keep the distinction
we just made in mind as we go over some of the more powerful
and effective ways to draw lots of traffic to your site inexpensively.
|
