Online Marketing

I get clients asking me if I do online marketing for their websites all the time.

I'm not sure exactly what to say. In many ways, YES, what I do when I determine how to create your website, logo, business card, etc is ALL a form of marketing. How your product looks and functions involves heavily upon what your designer thinks is the best way to market your item to the broadest audience. So in that effect, yeah....I do marketing all the time.

On the other hand, I think what people are most concerned with is maximizing traffic to their website. I do some of that too...when I produce my sites I use standard techniques I think every web-developer should use to try to maximize the site's rankings in a search engine. e.g., using clear titles, metatags, ALT tags for all the images, descriptions, etc.

But when it comes down to it, I find it difficult to say I'm a professional at it. I can't think of one clear website example of when a website just brought millions of visitors overnight by itself. In every case, it heavily involved the effort of the site owner work at bringing people to view the site.

I don't know if anybody SHOULD claim to be a professional at it. I know a couple big vendors who say they specialize in it, but after charging thousands of dollars on it, I don't find that they're any more effective then anyone else. Case in point, I once mentioned a client's website I had worked on once here in this blog. I didn't say anything negative about it, but I just commented about how I worked on it.

Weeks later my client called me back to have me take down this post because it was showing up in the search engines almost as high in ranking if not higher then some of the results that were supposingly done by the professionals. Personally I was a little surprised myself...but it goes to show how much of a grey area these "search engine optimization" services are. I learned to be much more careful how I comment on people's things.

My own site for instance is turning out to be a surprise. Every month my web logs show I'm more then doubling up on unique site visitors. So by doing nothing more then talking nonsense here and there in my blog, it's just drawing people in. I think I'm getting over 1000 visitors a month these days. *wave to everyone* I'm sure they're all pretty disappointed at what they find here haha. (I should put porn or something up to make it more worth the visit.) I'm sure 1000/mo is still a baby in terms of sites that are very popular, but for something that I'm putting very little effort into, that's not bad!

So I'm getting a better idea now on what develops website traffic. They key is then on how to utilize the right techniques to get "qualified" audiences to your site...because you want to target the audience that is most likely inclined to buy your product or service. Not just those who randomly fall on your site just because you mentioned the word "porn, porn, porn" a few hundred times on a comment.