Creating a website that no one knows about is like paying for a beautiful billboard ad and placing the billboard in the middle of the woods!

Your website is a powerful branding and marketing tool, an online store that is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But just because you built a website doesn't mean people are going to know about it. Like any business, you must market your website to drive traffic to it and generate sales.

Marketing your website generally falls into two major categories, mainstream media and digital media.

Mainstream Media - Mainstream media refers to traditional advertising methods, such as newspaper, radio and television. Depending on your business type, you may not advertise on these channels. If you do, it is important to include your domain name (www.mywebsite.com) with every ad you run. This also includes business cards, letterhead and any promotional products you have printed. The idea is to let people know you have a web presence, so that they will visit it and use it as a resource for the products and services you offer.

Digital Marketing - Digital marketing is the Internet equivalent to mainstream media. There are two basic ways for a someone searching the internet to find your website - through natural or organic search results, and through paid advertising.

1. Organic search results - means that the search engine being used has listed your website in response to a search query. Most search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN use over 100 factors in determining whether or not your website should be listed for a particular search term, and how far down the list your website will be shown. The beauty of organic listings is that it's free, but depending on the search query, you may be one of 20 million websites being listed for the same search term. Statistically, most people don't look beyond the first page of the search results, so if you are not listed in the top 10 search results, your website will probably not be seen. There are several techniques that can be employed to help your website rank better organically, and will be discussed on Search Marketing Corporation in future articles.
2. Paid Search Results - also known as sponsored listings. Basically this is like paying for radio, television or newspaper ads. Most paid listing models allow you to 'bid' for keywords. When someone does a search for one of those keywords, your ad shows up on the first page of the search engine. Because it is a bid model, the highest bidders will have their ads show near the top, with the other ads listed below based on bid amounts. Using sponsored listings is a quick way to drive traffic to your website and is fairly easy to use. But with factors like quality score, keyword matching and click through rate all affecting how much you pay for your placement, many first time advertisers spend twice as much money as they should for sponsored listings. Search Marketing Corporation will discuss best practice sponsored listing techniques in future articles.