The Many Ways to Market Your Website Online

I have been at the helm of a large internet dating site for the last 7 months.Our main focus on marketing has been with search engine optimization or SEO.While we do online advertising through Adwords and some affiliate programs our main focus has always been SEO.

When you have a web site that is looking to receive traffic rather than just being more of a brochure for your existing clients to visit you need a marketing plan.There are many ways to do this, first off there is the traditional marketing outside of the internet world.TV, magazines, newsprint, radio and the list goes on.Many sites on the net and within our market do this and do it well.Will this is a proven way of bringing business in, it can be very expensive especially if you want to hit a national or international level.

Another way which can be very hit and miss is through a viral marketing campaigns.One of the most successful viral marketing campaigns of all time would have to go to Hotmail.Every email that has ever been sent using a Hotmail account has a "join Hotmail" at the bottom.Hotmail is still one of the largest email services on the planet.Other successful viral campaigns include Blentec blenders, these guys are famous for blending anything on video and streaming it to the world, ever witness a ipod being blended?

Advertising online, these are many ways to do this, first off is advertising on search.This is one of the more popular ways to directly target your audience.All of the main search engines have some type of search marketing program, figure out what keywords you are trying to target and start spending.

There is also placement advertising, you basically select a site that you believe will bring business.Maybe it's a competitor or another business that is in a similar line of work, you place ads on their site in hopes they'll click the ad and join or purchase something from yours.

You can also do what is called content advertising, the ads are usually the same as placement ads and instead of picking specific sites you let Google find sites.Let's say for example your site sells flowers well Google will find any site that has flowers in the content and post your ads.Of course all of these ad campaigns are controlled by how much you want to spend.

Lastly is affiliate advertising, this is where you pay other individuals to direct traffic to your web site.The good news here is you only have to pay them if they buy something or sign up for something.The agreement is they won't get paid until a user has fulfilled this process.The great news with an affiliate program is that you only pay for business that converts, the bad part is it usually costs between $2-$5 and this is very dependent on the business.

As for our business we have focused heavily on SEO, we spend most of our days adding content to our site, building links and being very patient.Search Engines are a crazy beast and sometimes they don't make a whole pile of sense.SEO isn't for everyone as it takes a ton of knowledge and more importantly a lot of patience.Google for example gives a lot of credit to sites that have been around for a while, if your site is new you need to be patient.

Marketing your web site can be a very daunting and rewarding task, this is just a basic overview of the things you can do.Research as much as you can before diving into any of these areas and you'll be sure to find a formula that works.

About the Author

This article was written by Shawn Wilson, a member of the customer support team at Datepad, where internet dating is always free.

Datepad has a massive directory of informative dating articles along with a great list of dating site reviews on their dating blog.

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