 Search Engines Aren't Everything!
Well there are many different ways to market your web site online and drive that traffic to your site. Most people know about search engine optimisation or at least have heard about search engine optimisation and have a general idea of what it is and what it is all about. So what about the other methods of marketing a website.
We can't all just search engine optimise a website and then just wait for the search engines like Google to come by and pick it up. That just takes too long and there are many other sources of traffic that ever site should tap into to become a popular and successful site.
So lets have a look in to the other parts of online marketing.
Social Networks
Most people know about social networking and what it offers to the internet, from thousands of teens creating the most terrible looking MySpace pages on the Internet to the Facebook profiles with every application installed under the sun. Besides the negative it is a fantastic way to reach target demographics and specific people with specific interests.
You can take advantage of social networking by advertising your business or services on the social networks such as Facebook, MySpace or Bebo (there are many more).
Facebook offer pay per click advertising on thier social netowork. That is, you pay for every click of traffic that is sent from Facebook to your site. These clicks can be targetted towards certain demographics and age groups to ensure better click through rates and better conversions of your ad on your site.
List of social networks
Social Network Applications
This is a form of viral marketing that has appeared on the social networks over the last few years. As more and more people try and customise their profiles and pages to make their sites cool than others, more and more of these applications have appeared on the internet. Some of the most popular and most famous Facebook applications include, the now extinct, Scabulous. Applications like thise drew in a huge user base that returned continually to the application page and are exposed to advertising or additional services.
It isn't hard producing a Facebook or any other social network application. The hard bit is coming up with a really good application that people will want to use and spread to all of their friends. Either way, once you start a good social networking application, you're looking at generating a nice amount of traffic or even cash.
Social News
 So from social networking we look at social news sites. These sites are community based sites that rate and market news articles that submitted to the network. Sites such as Digg can cause websites to fall on its knees with the amount of traffic that they can generate. Writing a good news article to So use these with caution.
SMS on Steriods
These micro blogs aren't hugely popular everywhere in the world but where they still generate huge amounts of traffic. They're somewhere between a blog and a SMS. They allow all people or subscribers that are following a users profile to get status updates from profiles notify them when something is happening. It may not seem very powerful but when you integrate this technology with mobile phones or the mobile internet it is basically SMS on a mass scale.
You can update your online profile from your mobile phone, smart phone or iPhone and instantly notify everyone that is following your profile. A simple way to take advantage of this type of technology is to post updates about your products and services to these micro blogs allowing everyone to access the new updates and information.
Online Favourites and Bookmarking
These book marking services are just the same as the favourites folder in your browser. The difference to these online services is that when your computer crashes and you have to reinstall everything, you don't loose your favourite bookmarks because they are all store online.
Further more, these online links can be categories and tagged making them search able. Other users can search these tagged bookmarks. As a website owner your could promote your sites and artlces in these online bookmarking sites and allow everyone to find them via the network.
RSS Feeds
 Real Simple Syndication, the name is simple enough but the things you can do with the technology can become very technical. The simple use of RSS feeds is to push news articles and site updates out to all of the site's subscribers. The traditional method of notifying your users about site updates is to do it with an email marketing campaign where emails will be sent out to users to let them know of site updates.
Sending out emails constantly to a huge user base chews up bandwidth and adds to the worlds spam. RSS on the other hand delivers news directly to the users desktop or news reader where the user and check for updates as they happen. Live and instant updating is now made possible. This technology can be taken even further for republishing on other sites, and even publishing on micro blogs like Twitter. Being able to have your content published all over the internet is a very powerful thing.
Example feed, - http://feeds.feedburner.com/pbwebdev
Blogging
With the introduction of Blogs came a massive wave of publishers being able to get their content online. Not only has blogs given people the ability to have their content published online quickly and easily but it has also created a massive wealth of information for people to read and learn about various topics and opinions people have on these topics. Having a blog to promote your main site or content is a fantastic way to build traffic.
Email Marketing
This is one of the traditional ways of online marketing. Building a double opted in email list will ensure that the people that you are sending emails to actually want your email.
SMS Marketing
This is a very direct way of marketing to your clients or customers. I can also become very expensive. If you have a last minute message to get out to everyone on your SMS list then this is the fastest and most direct way to get to all of them.
Search Engines
 Search engines are a key traffic source for the majority of websites. Everyone knows Google. When you want to find things online you are often finding yourself saying, 'just Google it' for your answers. Now, search engine optimisation will only allow search engines crawl your site better.
Good optimisation will make things more accessible for the blind search engines, but how do search engines know that your site exists and how do you get ALL of those search engines to crawl your site. Well there are serveral different ways to get your site in to those search engines. Some of the methods of search engine optimisation will help your site get crawlled quicker by search engines but why nit just submit your site to the search engines and force them to crawl it.
Most of the top search engines out there will give you certain tools that you can take advantage of and get help promote your site to get it online. A simple xml site map is all you need to get started to submit your site online.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Everyone knows that if you want to find something on the internet that you'll turn to a search engine to give you the answers. Most of the sites that are returned for a search result are there because the search engines deem them to be worthy of having that placement.
It can take ages to get a site well placed in the search engines with lots of search engine optimisation. The easier way to get a high placement. Sure it will cost you more monmey but if you want the traffic and good well targetted traffic then this is the way to do it. Pay Per Click Advertising! Most of the fancy search engines offer some sort of pay per click advertising.
There is a lot of history behind pay per click advertising but it is all the same where ever you look these days with Goolge, Yahoo and MSN Search being the big players in online advertising.
Press Releases
Online press releases are just the new way of releasing news all over the internet. Doing a press release can cause such a buzz and your news article can be picked up and placed on sites such as Yahoo News, Google News, Forbes and other major news sites around the world. Not only can these online press releases be picked up by online publications but some of these are also pushed out to print publications.
Conclusion
So there are more methods of online marketing but these are the mina methods that we use. Please feel free to add more methods to the post. This article will be updated with more methods of marketing. If you want more information about any of these methods of marketing or want to implement some of them to your website then just shoot us an email and we'll organise something for you.
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