Offline Businesses – 5 Free and Easy Ways To Get More Website Traffic
Offline Businesses – 5 Free and Easy Ways To Get More Website Traffic
©2010 Doug Champigny, http://dougchampigny.com . All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
More and more offline companies have ‘brochure’ websites – static websites that just tell about the company, it’s people and it’s products. While that’s all fine and dandy for your existing clients to check, without some extra effort it’s not going to bring you a lot of new business, because most targeted prospects will never know it’s there. So let’s look at ways to get the attention of those prospects and get them to your website and hopefully through the doors of your offline businesses as well.
1) On-Site Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While this should have been looked after when the site was built, often it’s overlooked either out of ignorance or forgotten in the rush to collect from you. So to start with, check to see if your site is optimized for the search engines. In your web browser, go to your site, then choose View > Page Source from the browser menus. Do you see tags at the top of the coding for Title, Description and Keywords? Do they all have your main keywords listed in them? Don’t settle for a page title like ABC Company or Home Page – you need to incorporate the main phrase your potential customers would be searching for.
Is there a page on your site that links to every other page (a sitemap)? Or at least links of each page to all the others? Not only does one or both of these options make it easier for viewers to navigate your site, but it also makes it easier for the search engines to find every page – remember, search engines index PAGES, not sites.
2) Article Marketing. For offline businesses and online businesses alike, it’s important to remember that your prospects come online looking for information. In point form, write down every question you can think of that they might ask about your business, your products, and your industry in general. Now write informative articles that answer those questions – true articles, not sales pitches. You want to impress them with your expertise and how helpful your articles are. Add a paragraph at the end explaining who you are, what your company sells or what services they provide, and a link to your website. This paragraph is called an Author’s Resource Box and is standard online. Now submit those articles to the top article directories. Once published, they brand you and your company, demonstrate your expertise and help your prospective customers. You benefit both from the massive traffic at the directories, some of whom may click the link and visit your site, and from the search engines finding another backlink to your site.
3) Forum Marketing. Almost every niche has one or more popular forum covering their topics. Go to the major search engines and type in your industry or niche followed by Forum. Visit the forums that appear in the directories, and look for those with the biggest and busiest membership. Join the forum and read some of the posts each day for a bit til you have a good handle on how it’s run. Most won’t let you advertise in your posts there, but do allow a small ad in your signature on each post. Again be as helpful as possible, answering people’s questions fully when they’re looking for information. Once again, the idea over time is to make it obvious you’re an expert in the area, and to get them to click through to your site to find out more about you and your offline businesses. Of course, it’s also more backlinks for the search engines to find and follow to your site as well.
4) Social Media Marketing. This is a massive opportunity that most offline businesses never take proper advantage of. Set up an account at Twitter, for example, and do a search for your main keyword or keyword phrase. You’ll be shown each tweet that someone did with that word or phrase in it – go through those and watch for targeted leads, then click to follow those people. Ignore tweets from other suppliers, people who just mentioned it casually, etc, and focus on those you know will be in the market now or soon. Then watch your Twitter stream for questions they ask and answer them, engage them, and invite them to your site. Also, set up a page about your company at FaceBook – not a personal page, but what they call a ‘Fan’ page. Each time you publish a new article as in #2 above, mention it on both your Twitter account and your Fan page – with a link to the article, of course.
5) Business Blogs Marketing. Business blogs are the most common tool used by professional online businesses, yet almost ignored by offline businesses. Not only do blogs give you a fast and easy way to talk about your company, discuss your products and announce new products or services, but they can also be a great place to publish those same articles you wrote for the article directories. And since both search engines and blog directories index blogs, you have even more ways for people to find your business blogs, and through them find yet more backlinks to your web site.
These 5 quick and easy ways for offline businesses to get more traffic to their website are just the start – once you’ve mastered these you’ll see your site, your phone and your physical location picking up in visitors. And there are a lot of other free and paid ways for offline businesses to get more traffic to their websites, so get these strategies under control and then explore some of the other techniques so that you rise above and stay ahead of other offline businesses in your industry.
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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in online marketing through his Internet Marketing Coaching and his Affiliate Marketing Coaching programs. Give your online marketing the PowerStart it needs today – enroll now!
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