By Vedran Tomic, Tomic Internet Marketing
Launching a brand new website is an exciting, but stressful experience. Is the website good enough? Is everything working properly? Did I forget something?
Here are 3 questions you need to ask before spending a dime on promoting your website.
1. How Does My Website Fit Into My Business Objectives? This is an amazingly simple question that a lot of small business owners can’t answer. Websites should be built to serve a certain purpose. What is the purpose of your website?
To help you increase the number of sales leads, while reducing marketing costs? To help raise brand awareness? To serve as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool?
Once you figure out the role your website is going to take in your business operations, it’s time to translate that role into goals for your website – specific, attainable and trackable goals.
2. Am I Tracking Everything That Is Important? Once your website has a specific business purpose, it is time to track everything that makes a difference – what’s not tracked, cannot be improved. There are a number of free web analytics solutions that you can use.
Many experts usually recommend Google Analytics as it is free, powerful and simple to use. After you do this, consider setting up Google and Bing Webmaster Tool accounts to help you diagnose any issues your new website might have with search engines.
3. Do I Have A Launch Plan? It is very easy to get lost in the initial website promotion if you don’t have a plan. A launch plan that actually works can be as simple as a list made of websites that will help you promote your new site (websites that will give you links and share the news about your business).
Here are a few tips that will help you create your website launch plan:
- Create a list of your friends on social media sites and ask them to share the news of your new website.
- Make a long list of bloggers, webmasters and journalists that might be interested in writing about you.
- Identify communities crazy about what you do and introduce yourself.
- Ask industry websites to cover your website launch etc.
If you concentrate on answering these simple, yet very important questions, you will save yourself a lot of stress and headaches. Instead, you will have a foolproof way of launching a new website you can use in the future.
Vedran Tomic is the co-founder and CEO of Tomic Internet Marketing, a boutique Internet marketing agency headquartered in Connecticut. Vedran spends his time creating strategies that deliver high ROI for small and medium sized businesses.
