Quick Tips For A Successful Website

Your website is live, people are visiting and interacting, you're probably thinking that's it surely, show me the money! Whether you're running an ecommerce or a regular business site, getting it live takes time, content creation, site designed and built, so when all this is complete it means the hard work is done, right?!

Wrong, I'm afraid to say that anyone can get a website live, via free services, diy or paying a web development company to do the work for you. But I'm afraid this only sets the foundations of your online business, poor foundations can have long lasting effects. However, how you build on top of these will develop your online presence into either an also ran, or a market leader!

I sometimes hear from clients that they are not getting the results they expected from their new website. I then have to reiterate that a website can develop from very little effort or promotion, but if in a competitive niche, more time and energy is required.

If you can picture your website as a sapling within a forest of trees, the more competitive the niche, the more dense the forest, every tree having to fight harder to survive and reach for the light.

Bearing this in mind below are a number of quick tips to put into practice to make your website a success. Giving your website the best chance of good search engine rankings, targeted traffic and improved conversion rates.

Pre Launch

• Press Release - build buzz
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Google Business Centre listing
• Blogging
• Blog Commenting

Launch

• Search Engine Submission
• Google Shopping

Social Media Marketing

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Linked In
• Xing
• Delicious
• Stumbleupon
• Digg

Advertising

• Print Advertising
• PPC
• Business Networking
• HTML Email Marketing

Data Analysis

• Conversion Rate
• Top Content/Sellers
• Bounce Rate
• Traffic Sources

Post Launch

• Customer Referrals
• Special Offers

For instance if you dived into your analytics and found your best converting keyword phrase you could then write a blog post around it, driving further targeted traffic to your site. Combining this with data on your best converting social media site you could spend more time on the ones that convert instead of wasting time on those that don't.

A website is a good starting point for a business but if you can think more along the lines of Roy Castle and Record Breakers, "Dedication is What You Need!", you'll have more chance of the success you envisage online.