A website is no longer a shop window – it’s a travelling salesman.
Not long ago all you needed was a website and you had a shop window to display your goods to the world. It gave you access to a vast audience that, through search engine technology, actually came to you, pre-defined with an interest in your particular market sector; well targeted warm leads, seeking you out.
Times have changed and so has the web. With internet traffic doubling every two years the web has become hugely overcrowded and now a website has to be promoted and optimised to be found at all. However, as bandwidth has increased to compensate for the extra traffic, so has the functionality of the web. And this has provided website owners with new and improved ways to realise the marketing potential of their sites. Your website now has the capability to act as a travelling salesman – to go and find and interact with prospective sales targets.
Social networking provides this opportunity and it’s the most exciting thing happening on the web, representing a shift from outbound to inbound marketing. It provides control to the publisher and tools to webmasters that enable them to be more pro-active in marketing their sites. If you adopt social networking as a ‘route to market’ your website can seek-out and interact with a relevant, targeted new audience.
Del.icio.us, Facebook, Linkedin, Digg, and Technorati are just a selection from a raft of services that you can subscribe to. When you provide a profile (of your business) on these sites it increases the exposure of your website/organisation to a selected on-line community (that have expressed their specific interests) and drives targeted traffic to your website. But in addition the diverse references to your URL this generates can greatly contribute to the importance a search engine attributes to your site. And this can improve your search engine results and page rank.
Typically you will set up a blog that can be used for news and PR items (or as a separate events calendar) which can also be implemented as an RSS feed on your main website. You’ll have a profile on Facebook or Linkedin and much more. You would promote your blog on Technorati and use Digg to push the latest news items or pages from your website. All these channels can have links back to your main website and give it further penetration on the web.
It takes a bit more effort to get the travelling salesman on the road but with the volume of potential customers on the web it has to be worthwhile and webZeppelin can help.