Leave Money to Market Your Website

I was recently chatting with a business owner who needed help marketing her e-commerce website. It cost $10,000 to develop and had a nice design, lots of dynamic pictures, and an integrated shopping cart. It was also search engine optimized with a home page that included the most relevant keywords. I was looking forward to helping out and asked the obvious question: "What's the budget to market your site?" She said: "A couple hundred bucks a month." Huh?

Turns out she basically spent all her money developing and keyword optimizing her website... and now had very little left to market it. Why? Because she thought the search engines would find her site (remember, it was search engine optimized) and the resulting Web traffic would guarantee her business taking off. Not much I can do to help now...

Here are some suggestions to make sure this situation doesn't happen to you:

• Understand that natural search takes time. I don't care how search engine optimized your website is. It will still take (a long) time before the search engines find you, other website owners link to your site, and your site listing moves up the natural search ranking so that prospects can find you when searching on the keywords you care about.

• Use a 50/50 budgeting approach. Sure, every situation is different, but as rule of thumb, you should expect to spend on marketing at least what you do in developing your website. So if you budget to spend $2,500 in creating your site then you need that much (if not more) for marketing your site. That means you need a total budget of $5,000. Does that make you rethink how much you should spend on your website? Good.
  

• Please... no bells and whistles. A simple website that meets your basic needs is what you're looking for. Forget the "bells and whistles" since most of your visitors won't even care about them. For example, if your goal is to "get the phone to ring" then a website that describes your service, tells why you're great, and prominently displays your phone number is all you need to start.
  

• Don't spend a lot on SEO. Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of search engine optimization. With that said, if your website doesn't have lots of content to begin with then there's only so much you can do to keyword optimize it. Instead, buy an SEO book with great reviews on Amazon, put in practice what you learn, and then use the thousands of dollars you save on marketing your website.

With dollars in hand, you now have money to spend on generating Web traffic for your site!