Outsourced website marketing
Filed under: Blogs, Email Marketing, General, Link Building, Pay per click — admin @ 9:34 pm
Marketing your website, which means maintaining a steady flow of quality traffic, involves ensuring that it is full of up to date, compelling, material that keeps your visitors happy enough to come back again and again and, if your very lucky, spread the word amongst friends and colleagues.
Sounds simple enough until you try it. Procrastination is the thief of time and this is no better illustrated than in the countless websites I have visited that have not been updated for months, sometimes even years. Next time you’re looking at a website try and find something current, a piece of news, a press release, a competition with an end date that is still in the future. You won’t be surprised to find very little up to date content, especially on websites owned by small companies.
Why is this? Every small businessman I know understands the importance of a strong presence on the Internet, so why do they let the grass grow so long, figuratively speaking? Mainly because they’ve got more pressing things do to. Steven Covey would say that, keeping your website up to date is important but not urgent, because if it was urgent you would be doing it. If I asked you whether you would to update your blog, or website, write the odd press release or create an email newsletter to update your customers, you would say yes, of course you would.
You could employ someone to do it, but what would they do for the other 15 working days of the month, cost you money mainly. Well, why not outsource it, employ someone a couple of days a month, one day to research what you are going to do, and one day doing it. Sounds too good to be true? well it isn’t.
I have a client who owns a few small hotels scattering around the country. All the hotel managers have to do in order to keep the traffic rolling in to their website is make sure they keep three up to date offers on the home page, send out one email newsletter a month to their customers, create a press release and release it through an online newswire service, add at least one entry to their blog each month, spend an hour optimising their local pay per click campaign, and get three local businesses to add a link from their website to the hotels. Sounds simple enough but I can’t remember that last time one of the hotels completed every task. Some off them haven’t sent a newsletter out all year, even though they have a ready made template to use and helpline in case they get stuck. Their websites are still advertising Valentines Day offers, and I bet they don’t serve half the things in the restaurant that are on the menu on the site.
An out of date website is a crime. Would you send out last year’s brochure and price list? of course not.
