If You Build It, They Will Come?

Many of you will remember the line from the movie Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." Many businesses apply this methodology to their business model. I can't tell you how many times I've come across this misnomer in dealing with hosting and web design customers. They figure, "I've got a website now. The customers will start to buy my stuff. I can wait for the orders to start coming in." A few months later they call to complain that it isn't working and it must be something wrong. When I ask them what they have done to get customers, a lot of times they don't know what to say because they never thought of that approach. If we pause to think about the build and wait approach for a moment, we will soon see the error in this idea. Unlike a physical location, where you have customers driving or walking by all the time, online businesses need some way to attract traffic and customers to their website. In this article we will discuss a few methods that can be employed to bring customers to your website.

Search Engines

Getting listed in the search engines is usually a good place to start. There are two ways to get listed in the search engines; Pay-Per-Click placement, and organic search engine results. Depending on the industry and online competition, PPC placement can be a very inexpensive or very expensive way to attract customers to your website. If the cost per click starts to get high, be very careful, you could spend a lot of money and not be able to recoup those costs in sales.

Getting into the search engines themselves is quite another task, left for another article. There are many websites and articles that detail the process needed.

Advertising

Doing some type of advertising is absolutely necessary to gaining customers. Many times I hear