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Marketing Your Website Online
Every day we get people calling us and complaining that they did not make any money on their website. The first question we ask is what have they done to market their website? To which we usually get a brief moment of silence.If you expect a website to do the work for you, it wont. Your ecommerce websites are nothing more than cash registers and you have to get people to them to so you can sell the products you have for sale.Anyone that thinks that a website will do all the work probably thinks they can put a can on a table on their front lawn with a note, leave money and people will leave them money.You acually have a better change of someone leaving money in your can because you have people going by your hose and seeing the sign. That is in fact a type of marketing while building a website is more like making the sign and sticking it in the closet.It is important in any business to have visability and that is a difficult chore online with hundreds of billions of competing pages. So what do you do?Most people don't do anything and for sure those will be the ones that give up. Or they will complain to us that our system sucks because they did not have any sales.I am sorry people, but the website hosting company has very little to do with weather you get sales or not. Sure we can make the site faster, we an give you better tools and backups and ecommerce functions, but if you never get people to the website, none of that matters.I sometimes have to remind people that it is their business and not mine. I don't know anything about their product or service, I don't understand their market demographic or who their competitors are. I am a website hosting service and that is what I do know.I can't really help the flower vendor or the architect to get customers other than telling them to advertise. How you advertise will depend on your market. You need to know if there are trade publications or popular websites that can help move your business forward. As a website host, we just don't have that information.I am sure when your landlord comes to colect the rent you do not ask, how can I make money to pay it. If you run a business it is your job to know how to run it and if you don't, then you need to learn.Nobody can teach you what you need to know in a few minutes. Running a business and marketing online takes years to becme good at just like anything else. You need to build a brand, have a strict marketing plan and advertising campaign. If your advertising campaing is to build a 3 page website and sit back and wait, then you will be waiting quite a long time.I don't think it is difficult to understand that you have to advertise your website. You need to advertise any business. So why is it that people think a website wil advertise itself?
I usually tell people to do reasearch online, do some google seraches and learn about marketing. But it is usually too late. They have been waiting for a year or longer and nothing happened, they are not rich and they spent over $100 on hosting so far, so they are ready to give up.
It's a shame that so many products go unsold and undiscovered because the people making them are just too lazy or cheap to advertise.
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