Website Marketing for Small Businesses

You just had a website designed for you, what next?

I once had a client ask me why their business hadnt seen any increase in volume since i uploaded their website for them? I asked him how much have you marketed your website and he had this blank look on his face. He had fallen vicitim for what most people who create an online identity fall for.They never market their website they just sit back and let it float around in cyberspace.

As much as the internet has the ability to reach millions of people at once in so many countries. Your website has to be put in a position to be reached by your audience. This is done by properly marketing your website.

How do you market your website?

There are many ways to market your website while still not burning holes in pocket or spending excessively on advertising.

1. Word of Mouth: Myspace.com succesfully used this method of marketing to gain popularity for their website. This method is often underestimated and overlooked. When you first launch your site be sure you tell everyone and anyone you know to tell anyone and everyone they know. There is no marketing weapon as powerful as a satisfed customer telling friends and family about your product.

2. Site Submission and page Ranking: Search engines such as Google, Ask.com and Yahoo are databases used to hold most of the worlds internet files. This is also a major method with which most online surfers find the sites they are looking for. They simple type in keywords relevant to the website they are looking for and the search engine displays the websites according to their ranking on their engine. A websites ranking determines what position on the generated results list your page will be on. The higher your rank, the better positioned your website will be. If you want to learn more about page ranking go to WIKIPEDIA there is alot of information about the topic on there or consult a search engine optimization specialist.

3. Guerilla Marketing: This is a perfect method of marketing for small businesses.

HTML FOR BEGINNERS

INTRODUCTION

My first advice to anyone reading this blog is that you should not be scared of the way acronyms that are used to describe computer languages sound. The first time i took on any kind of computer programming the sound of languages and programs like HTML, PHP, FLASH, MYSQL, CSS.... and so on seemed like they were out of space and that my thinking faculty was never going to be able to process this kind of information. I however found this to be very untrue as i embarked on learning all the languages and programs need to become a web designer. I however must warn you that learning this language will require some smarts, some consistency and alot of patience and microreading.

HTML stands for "Hypertext Markup Language" and is one of the languages required to communicate with your browser to display the information you code into that browser. Seems complicated? On the computer you are currently reading this blog from, go to the view button on your browser window and click on it, on the drop down menu that is displayed, click on view source and it will show you all the HTML code used in designing this particular webpage.

Another thing you have to know is that learning HTML would be like learning a new language like french, german or english. The difference is as opposed to using a regular language to communicate with other people. HTML is used to communicate with your browser.

Note: There are 3 majors browsers used on the internet:

1. Internet Explorer (A Windows Invention used by a majority of the Internet browsing population).

2. Firefox ( Created by an independent entity tired of all the bugs and viruses that internet explorer is associated with).

3. Safari ( This is the browser used by Apple computers).

The one major downside of using HTML as a method of designing your webpage is the fact that it is not consistent across all browsers which means sometimes Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari all render HTML code differently on each browser which means in one browser a particular result could be achieved and be non existent in another browser. There are other languages that are consistent across all browsers like PHP ( Hypertext Processor which is a server based scripting language that you script on the server itself to render a webpage but it is out of the scope of this blog).