| Marketing a website can be difficult if you consider how many sites are already out there. There are millions of websites out in the Internet, most of them alike, with almost the same format, color, font, and appearance, and differing only in content. This difference is actually all that matters, because no matter what the graphic designers or animators say, content is still king. The better your content is, the more useful a website is, and the more people it serves, the more popular it becomes. The paradigm of Web 2.0 exists perhaps as the best evidence of how content is king. In the Web 2.0 universe, people are able to freely deliver and read each other?s opinions; participate in social networks and know more people all over the world; and make one?s private life as unguarded as possible. This means that if word gets out on a product or service, word also quickly spreads. This can spell profits for good products and services, and the demise of poor ones. The same goes for websites: great websites or extremely bad ones can get a lot of hits, but the good ones stay online, while the bad ones, after their sensational debuts, die a natural death in the graveyard of anonymity. So how can you make use of this paradigm and appeal to as wide an audience as possible? One way is to exploit the use of content as king, and to show how useful you can be. There are many ways to do this, say by producing great articles on your website, or sponsoring web events. Supplement these marketing efforts by bringing your content out into the web universe. You can have a newsletter about your site. Forget about printing newsletters. Online newsletters can be a great thing for your clients to read. All you need to do is to know what content will appeal to your audience. Before you start planning out your format and content, work on your marketing plan. Study your audience. What is its age range? Do you have teenagers, young adults, adults, middle aged parents, or senior citizens in your market? Are you appealing more to girls, men, or both? If you know what your audience is like, you can better tailor your articles and newsletter content to fit your audience?s needs and wants. A web newsletter cannot be as long as an offline newsletter, where you can have long articles that draw out many details of a story. A person?s attention has to be captured in five seconds or less: that means that your newsletter stories should be extremely short, but likewise extremely engaging. Employ writers who write short feature stories, and make sure that they write in a simple language that is easy to understand. Your articles should not only be about your products, services, website, or company. Talk about issues that are relevant to you and your audience. For instance, if you are dealing with accessories, talk about the history of the diamond trade in very few words; or talk about he price of gold on the world market and how it can change; or talk about what clothes go with what jewelry. Give your customers something useful, and they will remember you better. Engage in hard selling techniques, and you will end up alienating them. Lastly, update your newsletter constantly. You can have three or four articles, and perhaps add some illustrations. But you need to constantly remind your clients of your presence, so save articles for next time. You can choose a weekly, bi-montly, or monthly update, depending on your budget. The advantage to having more frequent updates is that your clients will always see you in their inboxes; the disadvantage is that you have to do more work. There are many different ways that you can get people to subscribe to your newsletter. You can have them sign up through your website, and tell everyone on your social networks to subscribe. Avoid spamming people and make sure that you give them an option to unsubscribe. If you think about the needs of your market when writing and distributing your newsletter, you can better meet its desires and make profits in the process. |