Know Your Reasons for Promoting Your Web Site

With any marketing or promotional plan you must address the most basic question first: “What are my primary end goals I want to achieve by marketing or promoting my web site?” Only after you have an honest answer to this question can you actually develop a plan to successfully promote it. A marketing plan, then, becomes the tactical steps to achieve your end goals.

Ideally, your goal is a single goal you can drive towards, but it is alright to have a few end goals – as long as they are not mutually exclusive where achieving one goal makes it impossible to achieve another. At this point I have been speaking at a very high level – all theory and no substance.

Some specific goals from promoting your web site are:

• Increase product or service sales (money motivation)
• Generate largest number of visitors possible (no focus on cultivating visitor loyalty to return)
• Generate loyalty among visitors (focus on cultivating return visitors)
• Target specific types of visitors (your website content is very focused and only appeals to a small audience)
• Generate ad revenue (multiple goals from above apply if this is your main end goal)
• Others I haven’t thought of (leave a comment if you think of other goals and I’ll respond or write a follow-up post)

Why do I need to know my end goals?

Your end goals determine what tactical steps you need to take to effectively promote your web site. You will use different techniques if your goal is to sell a product that if it is to promote your hobby web site detailing the history of the Smith family [see this post]. For example, if you are promoting an ecommerce web site, you will want to leverage Google’s Product Search and list all of your products there to increase visibility of you products to the public. On the other hand, if you’re not selling products, you don’t need to use Google’s Product Search as a techqnique for marketing your web site.

This may seem obvious - to begin with the end goal in mind, but you’d be surprised how many people just meander their way through trying to get the word out about their web site without defining their goals and developing a concrete plan with specific action items. So your first assignment: figure out exactly what it is your success criteria is for promoting your web site.