You’ve got a website. It clearly spells out who you are, what you do, and why you’re amazing. It maybe even has a Call to Action to get visitors to send you their contact information, or purchase right then and there!

Step 2, complete!

Step 1 is tricky. How do prospective clients find your website?

Let’s step into the mind of your customer. They need what you’re selling. They have the money to pay for it. (These two qualifications are generally necessary for someone to be a “customer.”)

There are two types of prospective customers: those who ARE looking for what you’re selling, right now, and those who are NOT looking for it, right now.

You can use a few tactics to get both of these customer types visiting your website, and buying what you sell.

1- SEO

Search Engine Optimization – it spoon-feeds Google (and the other major search engines) with direct information about your site.

By using keywords, head tags, and meta tags, you can tell the spiders that crawl thousands of websites every day EXACTLY what you want them to think your site is about.

Keywords are useful if someone is actively searching for your type of business. Think about what they would use as search terms.

Use these keywords in the titles of your posts, bold them in your content, and insert them in the header and meta tags of your pages.

(If you don’t know how to do this, you can hire companies like mine to do it for you.)

2- SOCIAL MEDIA 

Everybody talks about how social media marketing is the next big thing – but lots of people don’t understand how it could apply to their business.

“I don’t have the budget to hire someone working full time on Twitter.”

“I don’t know if it will work.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

If you’ve been having these reservations about using social media marketing for your business, here’s an easy way to think of social media: it’s a cocktail party.

Imagine you’re at a cocktail party, and someone you don’t know, and have never met, mentions something about your industry. Would you politely enter the conversation?

Of course you would! If you offer interesting information, and have a perspective that helps someone else understand your industry better, they want to talk to you.

You know what is really tacky at a cocktail party?

I SELL WEBSITE DESIGN SERVICES AND YOU SHOULD HIRE ME TO REDESIGN YOUR WEBSITE.

Saying this at a cocktail party, over and over again, will keep your conversations short, and you’ll definitely be going home alone that night.

Gary Vaynerchuk, social media evangelist, put it this way: “Twitter is not for talking. Twitter is for listening.”

Listen to what people say on social media. Offer thoughtful interactions. Build relationships.

That’s how business networking is done properly in real life, and social media is no exception.

3- COMMENT ON PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS’ WEBSITES AND BLOGS

Easily, the most underutilized marketing strategy is comments.

Think about how often you check your own statistics. Compulsively checking your Google Analytics reports, and the comments on your blog posts, has been called “empty productivity,” and for good reason. It’s not a valuable (and immediate) metric that can seriously impact the running of your business day to day, but it is fulfilling to our ego when someone interacts with our content.

Think about how elated you feel when you get comments on a Facebook thread you started, when someone comments on your blog post, when someone retweets what you said.

We love that. Your prospective clients, they love that. Give them the interaction that we all crave, and you will quickly build an online friendship that could easily transition into a sales conversation.

Many times, the website owner has to moderate a comment, and it’s easy enough to click on your link and see who the heck just commented. Once they get to your site, though, do you make it easy for them to buy? If not, you should…

HAVE A CALL TO ACTION ON YOUR WEBSITE

When somebody gets to your site, what is the specific action you want them to take?

  • Sign up for your email newsletter?
  • Purchase your product through PayPal?
  • Fill out a contact form for more information?
Have a specially designed graphic in your sidebar asking people to do, IN BIG, BOLD LETTERS, the very thing you want them to do.
And then, make it easy for them to do it.

(Practice one of these tactics, right now. Leave a comment. I might buy what you’re selling someday.)