By now, we hope you realise the importance of every business including a website in their budget. But if you don’t also include marketing, your capital outlay is pretty much wasted.

There are approximately 400 million websites out there in cyberspace, growing every day. And many of them are probably your competitors. So if you don’t have a marketing strategy, your online presence will be ignored.

Here are six simple, yet effective, online marketing strategies that every business should  have.

1. A professional website: Sounds obvious doesn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe the number of businesses that have a dodgy website, with links that don’t work, poor grammar and spelling, no call-to-action, unattractive design, non-intuitive structure. The list goes on. And, unfortunately, with all the do-it-yourself options out there, more and more people are trying to design their own website, only to find that it is not generating leads.
2. Search engine optimisation: This goes hand in hand with a professional website. What it does is ensure Google and other search engines can “see” your site. There are several ways to do this, including meta-data, keywords, article marketing and genuine backlinks.
3. A blog: Search engines don’t really like stagnant websites, and a blog that is regularly updated is a great way to keep your content fresh. As an added bonus, if you do it well, you could set yourself up as a subject matter expert, creating opportunities for further marketing (ie guest posting, media interviews and so on)
4. Email Marketing: This is a great way to stay front-of-mind with current and potential customers. You can offer an incentive for them to sign up to a newsletter and voila – you start to build a valuable email database of people interested in your product or service.
5. Social Media: I know we’ve gone on about this a lot,  but we can’t stress enough how vital it is to have a social media presence – at the very least Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s a great way to engage customers and drive them to your website.
6. PPC: Pay per click advertising means you only pay when people click through to your website. Things such as Google Adwords and Facebook advertising is PPC, and are reasonably priced options for online advertising. A word of warning though – you need to choose your keywords carefully, otherwise your target audience won’t necessarily be clicking through.

Direct Sites Online has more than 10 years’ experience in online marketing, so if you want more traffic to your website, call us now on 02 9557 7623 or email info@directsitesonline.com