Traffic for Your Business Web Site

Whether you actually sell through your web site (as you will eventually have to) or whether you just inform visitors about your company, your products and your personnel, the web site will only be successful if people come to see it. You need traffic.

1. Inner circle

I often visit companies for training and an employee will say to me, "Yes, I think we have a web site but I haven't visited it." OK, this web site is not a success. If your own employees don't think it is of any interest, who will. Start by making the web site interesting for your own staff and build up from there. Give your people reasons for checking the company web site at least once a week.

2. Existing customers and suppliers

This is the next step and the promotion is easy, straight-forward and well-targeted. Make sure everyone who already does business with you knows about your web site and has reason to visit. Get feed-back. These are the people who are really interested in you and who want you to succeed. Use their comments to fine-tune your site.

3. Prospects

Here's where your web site should start generating business. Prospects are people who you've already identified as being potential customers. Send them to your web site. Keep track of comments and sales. This is still a limited pool of potential customers so you can evaluate and gauge reactions and results. Now you can see if your web site causes a good prospect to turn into a sale.

4. General visitors

Finally the big test. Does your web site attract people who would not otherwise know about you and do some of these visits result in sales? Web sites are not (or should not be) very expensive to run so you only need a bit of extra business to cover the expense. On the other hand, most visitors are probably not going to buy right away so you should have substantial traffic to generate a few sales.

Here, at searchengines.com, is the bible as far as generating traffic is concerned. Despite the name, the site does not deal exclusively with search engines but also with general factors like web site design, "stickiness" and ease of navigation. I found a lot of good hints there and the emphasis is on positive, site-building techniques rather than "tricks". Schedule some time to go through the site and apply what you can to your site. There are lots of sad, neglected sites out there which noone ever sees. The edge goes to the company that makes sure their site is not one of those.

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