“Ask not what you can do for your website, but what your website can do for you”

Once you have a website you want it to earn its daily crust, in reality this means that it has to be marketing your services or products. Assuming that your website now fulfils the criteria of being attractive and informative to prospective customers the main trick is to get prospective customers to actually look at your website.

There are various ways in which you can do this:-

A.Get your website name out in the area where your prospects are going to be so that they will see it and pay it a visit.

B.Pay to advertise your website in more traditional media (think of that TV advert for compare-the-meerkat.com)

C.Advertise your website on the internet.

Let’s take each of these in turn;

A.Getting your website name out in the area your prospects will see it may be as simple as painting it on the side of your vehicle, putting up an A-board where you are working, painting it on your shop window, putting it clearly on your brochures, invoices, mailings and business cards or even printing it on little stickers and sticking them to £20 worth of two pence pieces and spending it all in local shops!

Pros; this is cheap and easy to do, it is generally quite quick and comparatively low effort.

Cons; it is extremely local and is totally passive (let’s face it, half the population walk around with their eyes closed half the time), it is very hard to actually measure what effect it has.

B.Paying to advertise in the traditional media is usually the first thought of most small businesses when it comes to marketing. You can advertise almost anywhere these days; TV and radio, hoardings, bus-shelters, the local cinema, free and paid local papers, trade press, national press, farmers’ fields, your parish magazine and even a card in your local newsagent’s window.

Pros; It is a tried and tested, traditional route. It is aimed at the geographical area you want to target, the prices are fixed by a rate card so you know what it is going to cost you before you commit.

Cons; It is often pretty slow; it can take several weeks even to get an entry into the local paper. It is often very expensive; even a small ad in a national paper costs several thousand pounds and let’s not even think about TV! It is ethereal; an advert in the paper today is lining the cat’s litter tray the tomorrow. Conversely it can come back to bite you in the future; if you run an advert with a promotion you may find someone coming in 2 years later clutching the ad and demanding their half price deal! Your advert may win awards but you still won’t be able to actually measure what effect it has had on prospective customers, in fact it may have no effect whatsoever but you still have to pay out lots of money for it.

C.Advertising your website online is where Westcountry Media can really help you; particularly in the area known as pay-per-click. There are some very successful entrepreneurs who believe that pay-per-click advertising is the single most important shift in the entrepreneurial marketing world this century, and to share a small business success story, a chiropractic clinic reported a 77% increase in qualified web traffic in just one month! In a nutshell, pay-per-click works like this; a prospect puts some words into a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc), and up comes a list of results. Along the top of the page and on the right hand side the page is a list of “sponsored” links; these are organisations that are subscribing to the pay-per-click service. If the prospect clicks the link and therefore visits that website, then and only then does the system register a “click” for which the website owner pays. Think of it a robotic sales person, paid on commission for booking appointments.

Pros; Westcountry Media offer a pay-per-click service that covers the set up, management and your pay-per-click budget (so that you are not responsible for the click charges). It is a pay-as-you-go service so you aren’t tied in to a yearly commitment. Being specialists they can ensure that the right keywords are used to ensure that the traffic that is coming to your website is not just casual surfers but people who are actively seeking your type of service in your geographic area, this means that you won’t be paying for visits by people who were actually looking for body building when you are a building contractor, or looking for four inch nails when you are a nail artist. You get a monthly report of visitors to your site so you can see the effect that the pay-per-click is having on traffic to your site and therefore analyse the effect it is having on sales enquiries and your bottom line.

Cons; there aren’t any serious ones; Westcountry Media will help you dip your toe in the internet marketing pool but they won’t make you stay there (or continue to pay for it) if you don’t like the water!