Website Marketing

Active v Passive

Gone are the days when you could easily set up a website and magically money started to flood in. It can still happen, if you catch the zeitgeist, imagine registering Vuvuzelas.com in time for the 2010 World Cup?

Naturally I can help you with the following, but realistically you can (and are probably better off at first) doing a lot of it yourself. One main actvity I can help with is pulling all the activity together into a strategy, and propose extra work to fill in the gap so you have a balanced approach and work towards results.

Before you start

Make sure you install a tool which can record how people found your website, what pages they visited and so forth. AW Stats is free and Open Source, it reads details off your webserver and is a good place to start if you have not got anything in place. Google Analytics is also popular and free, this works on the browser side and reads information your users actually experience. Both server side and browser side approaches have pros and cons, but the important thing is you are using something that can measure the activity on your website, where your traffic is coming form and what people are doing on your website.

Active Promotion

This has always been vital and should be your most profitable activity in the short term. It will get people to your website and is simple. Tell everyone you know about it. You cannot do it once though you must do it over and over again.

Step 1 - Email everyone you know telling them about your site, ask them for feedback, this will make them more likely to visit it, read it and remember it.
Step 2 - Regularly update your social network sites (Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Linked in etc) with references to offers or promotions on your website.
Step 3 - Ask close freinds and colleagues to do steps 1 and 2 as well.
Step 4 - Start building an email list of clients and potential clients. Do not purchase lists, but build your list through your own contacts.
Feedback - review what has worked and decide when you will repeat it.

Passive

To be honest ‘passive’ is probably the wrong word, as it is quite active! There are a number of steps to complete. The reason this is passive, is because you are waiting for people to find you and results depend on the number of people searching (which will be seasonal) and the current competition.

Step 1 - Research the keyword (phrases) - that peple might type in to find you. Google Adwords is an excellent place to do this. There is a keyword tool which helps identify this, but nothing works better than actual results and running a Google Adwords PPC campaign will get genuine visitors to your site and identify which keywords actually work for your site.
Step 2 - Website design or review - to see how well your website is targeted at the keywords you have researched. Then optimise your content for these keywords.
Step 3 - After "Go-Live" Activity - register with relevant directories, write articles about what you do and create links on key sites of interest to your product or service.
Feedback

I can help you with all of the above, actually doing the steps or pulling it all together for you into a comprehensive plan.

NB: The approach for Shopping Cart sites are generally different. Here you need to focus on Pay per click, Google base, aggregating sites and affiliate marketing.

Some Clients

Host & Domains

Edwin Cooke provides a wide variety of web solutions from domain registration through to web hosting

Domains - £10.00
- typically .com 1 year & .co.uk 2 years.
Web Package - £30.00

Bells & Whistles

Specialists in Database Driven Tools (PHP / MySQL / Javascript)

These can create games, sticky content, viral content for people to gossip about and drive traffic to your site.
We can also create useful tools (quote engines, info-tools) to help close sales and generate leads for you.