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When it comes to marketing your own website, it is easy to let it slip. As a website programmer you may spend much of your time installing and implementing marketing techniques on customers websites. The job can be incredibly stressful at times and you often you have tight deadlines looming. It is easy to get carried away with all of this and not practice what you preach. All websites need to be maintained and updated to achieve good rankings on the search engines. Websites that are built and then just left tend to feature quite far down the results pages if at all.  

Making sure that your website and online marketing is kept up to date is not only important in terms of improving or maintaining your search engine rankings but also from a portfolio point of view. If a potential client clicks on to your website, they will want to see examples of previous work you may have done and information about yourself or company. If the site look dated, the information isn’t up to date or there has been no new news articles for 12 months, it doesn’t fill people with confidence.

Marketing is vital if you want your website to be a success. There are a number of different ways in which you can market your website such as social media marketing, email marketing, Pay per Click or SEO. All forms of marketing have their advantages but if you have a limited budget then you will need to decide which one you will give you the best return on your investment.

Basic SEO (search engine optimisation) should be done on all websites as standard as this is what helps it get found on the search engine sites such as Google. SEO basically means optimising a website so that it fits in with the current algorithm that the search engines use when they are deciding where to rank a site on the search engine results pages. It involves multiple elements some of which are straight forward and others which are for the more advanced online marketer.

Ideally you want a web agency or SEO expert to optimise the site for you and then if you cannot use them long term, ask then to show you what you need to be doing going forward.

You need to consider what phrases or keywords you want to try and get ranked for and make sure that your site has enough content around these phrases to even stand a chance. It is important to ensure that these are the best phrases for you to target and will get you not only the most amount of traffic but also quality traffic that is likely to convert.

Facebook has been used for a number of years now by companies as part of their marketing strategy. Some businesses do not like the idea of using some social media sites such as Facebook as they feel it is not professional enough, but in doing this they may be missing out on a potentially huge amount of business.

More and more people are using social media to find products and services they need, even professional services such as accountants and architects. For this reason it is vitally important to have a presence on there. It may be that you do not get any enquiries directly through the social media sites, but it can all help to build up brand awareness and trust. You may just use Facebook as another form of contact for some people, as if someone can quickly send you a message they are more likely to contact you than having to pick up a phone. This can make it easier for people to get in touch and again act as a plus for your business going forwards.

IF you are unsure of how to go about using social media then you may want to go on a training course or outsource your social media to a third party to manage.

When you are establishing and promoting your business you may make the sensible decision to create a website for your company but in researching your options you may find one aspect confusing, do you need a website designer or a website developer?

The simple answer to this question is that ideally you need both. To clarify this, we need to understand the difference between these two services and why they are equally as important when we are seeking to promote a new business.

A web developer is employed to build the website and make its elements work as they should. The core structure of the website is developed by a back-end developer whereas a front-end developer is concerned with the interface that is seen by the visitor to the site. Both of these aspects are essential but may not necessarily be carried out by the same person or company.

Website designers, as the title suggests, are concerned with the aesthetic appearance of the website. They are interested not only in attracting clients to your site but keeping them there so that the visitor reads the content and hopefully gives you their business.

So, in conclusion, both of these are needed to build an effective website that will promote your business on the internet and help convert clicks to sales.

There are so many websites on the internet promoting a vast array of businesses and products so how can you make your website stand out from the crowd and attract customers?

The first and probably the most obvious is that your website loads correctly when someone clicks on the link. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a site and then waiting to see whether it eventually loads. The majority of potential clients will look elsewhere if the website does not load in the first five seconds.

Once a visitor arrives at your site it should be appealing to the eye. The colour scheme should reflect your business for example if your business is a gardening business you would expect there to be images of plants on the home page and that the main colours would be shades of green.

The font that you choose should be clear to read without appearing childish as you want to promote a professional business model. It is a good idea to limit the amount of text on the first page as this is off putting to some visitors and is unnecessary as more detailed information on your products or services can be located on later pages.

When carrying out any online or web marketing it is vital to track the progress of the work you are doing to see if you are getting a return on your investment.

There are a huge number of ways in which you can tackle online marketing and lots of possible avenues you can explore. Each marketing avenue has different associated costs some being relatively cheap and others being quite costly.  You will need to review the possible marketing options and decide which ones you want to concentrate your budget on. Some marketing avenues work better than others for businesses within certain industries.  It may be that you have a three to six month rolling strategy which allows you to test a number of marketing avenues over a twelve-month period and then decide which one worked best for you. You should bear in mind that some of the marketing techniques can take longer than 3 months to see the full effect therefore you may need to give it longer to see if it really is working. Examples of this is link building or Search Engine Optimisation which will improve the organic listings of the website.

Social media marketing now plays a massive part in many businesses’ online marketing strategy. It offers some great benefits and can often be done on a tight budget if you put the time in.

If you are a business looking to boost your online traffic or sales of a product or service, then you can use social media to instantly reach your audience. Many of the social media sites and services that they offer are free, even to businesses which is quite rare, so I would strongly recommend that all businesses use it in some way.

Sometimes businesses use social media sites as another way for their customers to contact them. If you do this be sure to check the sites regularly for messages and respond in a timely manner.

This has proved very successful and has given some businesses the edge over others when it comes to gaining new business.

If you are new to social media then it may be worth investing in some training with a social media marketing expert who will be able to show you the types of content you should be putting on the sites and how to get the most out of it.

If you have an interest in marketing, technology and design then the job of a web programmer may be right up your street. The job often offers a lot of variation and can sometimes be challenging which many people enjoy.

There are many ways in which you can get in to web development. It may be that you go through the education route, going to college or university to gain a qualification in programming, or you can choose to do a course online or take a job that offers training. Many web developers are self-taught, and this can be a great way to learn the industry if you have a way of developing sites at home. This can also allow you to build up your skills in an evening whilst still earning money working in another job at the same time.

Many website developer’s program in different languages, some of the languages have similarities, but each has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example a site may be coded with PHP or C++. Sometimes you are limited as to what language you can use depending upon the server you are going to be hosting the site on.

You need to ensure that you keep up to date with the latest advances in terms of security and functionality.  

When it comes to website marketing, so many businesses concentrate all their efforts on getting traffic to their site that they often forget to find out how much of that traffic is converting. There are a huge number of factors that contribute to conversions on a site such as price, ease of check out process, delivery and reviews. If your website is hard to navigate round or full of adverts that are too distracting, you may find that a number of people leave the site quite quickly after landing on it. This means that all the money spent on bringing in traffic (especially if you do paid for ads) is essentially wasted.

Make sure you spend some time analysing your competitors, see what they offer that you don’t or how they display information. Also check to see if your prices are competitive. If you are confident that you are offering a good service or product then you need to start pushing your site through organic and possibly paid for search to get the visitors to it. Using tools such as Google Analytics will allow you to see what pages people are visiting, what pages they are leaving on and the route they are taking through your site. If for example you notice that lots of people are leaving on the page that describes the delivery costs, then it may be that your costs are too high or you don’t offer next day delivery for example.  

With the end of the year fast approaching, many companies are thinking about their marketing budget and if they need to increase it to the run up to Christmas. Depending on what industry you are in, Christmas may be an extremely busy time for you and you need to start planning months ahead to be ahead of the game. Christmas items are already starting to hit the shops and the TV is becoming packed with adverts for children’s toys.  Whether you are looking at undertaking most of the marketing yourself or outsourcing it all to a marketing agency, you will need to decide on a strategy and how the budget will be split between different marketing avenues.

There are so many forms of marketing, online and offline that it can be a struggle to know what to invest where. You need to establish who you are marketing towards and how is best to interact with them.  If for example you sell children’s toys or gifts then you may market to the children but you will also need to market to the parents to give them a good reason to buy your product above the thousands of other toys that are on the market.