Marketing My Website – How to Do it Yourself
By SI Mitchell

Ok, so you’ve decided it’s time to start getting more customers for your product or service and you need a marketing road map to follow. Here is a detailed overview of what you should be focusing on in promoting your website. Key in on the word focus here… You do not want scattered efforts or you’ll end up with scattered results.

Here is the list of things I’ll cover regarding the marketing of your website:

1) Domain Selection 2) Hosting 3) Setup of Website 4) Adding Content 5) Marketing Activities

Let’s start of with domain selection. If you already have a domain but it does not contain a keyword (search phrase) that your customer would use to find you, you start off with a little disadvantage to those websites that do contain at least a partial match for the keyword phrase your market would be seeking. Don’t worry, if you publish great content on your site and get some good quality backlinks to it authentically, you can overcome some of this keywords not being in your domain issue. Now if you don’t already have a domain it’s a really good idea to do some keyword research and select an appropriate domain for it that’s available. You can check the availability of domains at either of my favorite registrars: moniker.com or namecheap.com.

Remember that although you want to have keywords in your domain you don’t want something ridiculously long or hard to remember. Keep it to a relevant 2-3 words if possible.

Now, on to hosting. When choosing a web host you want to ensure the following:

* It’s some flavor of unix (example: linux, centOS, debian, redhat, etc) * They will give you your own unique IP

The rationale for wanting your website hosted on a unix flavor of operating system is that many of the most powerful content management systems and marketing scripts available for websites are built to run from this type of hosting account. Fortunately about 98% of the web hosts out there offer this type of setup.

As for the second criteria…this is so that if another person hosting with the same company is not on your IP address and if they start doing some spamming or serving up malware, etc you won’t be in the same ‘bad neighborhood’ as they are. This is also important when trying to achieve good search engine rankings.

Setting up your website does not have to be difficult at all. You can either buy a template from templatemonster.com and have a designer customize it for you or you can spend about 1-2 hours setting up a self-hosted WordPress.org script which is a powerful content management system and there are 100s of very nice free design themes you can apply in a snap. The advantage of using a WordPress CMS hosted on your web site is that for some reason Google and the other engines seem to really love sites built on this platform. The rationale is that the organization of the site is done very well with these systems and it makes it very easy for you to update and share your content. Which leads us to the next element.

Adding content to your website should be done at least weekly. Why is this you ask? Simply put, Google and other engines don’t care for sites that are static-business-card websites. They love sites that update with great quality and unique content. I can almost guarantee your competition is updating their sites at least occasionally. It has a huge impact on the marketing of your website and ultimately your business. If you’re not a writer, don’t sweat it. This process can be outsourced for decent rates.

Now after you get clear and understand that marketing online is about publishing, you’ll want to consider publishing in a variety of formats such as text (on your website and other publishing directories), audio and video. For every piece of media you publish, with an emphasis on text, you want to ensure the search engines notice those pieces of work. You’ll need to get lightly familiar with social bookmarking which allows for the search engines to find your publishing pieces *very* quickly. To sum it up, it’s just a group of sites that allow users to share content and for some reason Google and the others consider these sites ‘authorities’ so they check them often to see who’s updating and when. All you end up doing is filling out a very small form on a few websites and hit the submit link button. Get your published pieces indexed and you will get your website found…and ultimately ranked high on the search engines.

Ok, I know that was a lot to digest but keep in mind this can be a simple process. The core of marketing your website should be on the initial setup, realizing that you need to publish fairly often (and that this can be outsourced), and that once you publish you need to ensure those pieces get noticed.

Get a free 15min site eval and phone consultation at http://greatwebstrategies.com “Online Marketing that works…period.”