HOW WILL PEOPLE FIND MY WEB PAGE?

Since the web is such a new medium and constantly changing, many aspects of web marketing are not well developed. Millions of webpages, yes, MILLIONS of pages are now online on the internet. The websites range from student personal pages to multinational corporations, all posting their personal and company web pages online.

Knowing that there are now millions of people connected to the internet, the newcomer to web page designing figures he'll put up an attractive page and soon boatloads of people will be eagerly seeking his site and hopefully buying something or at the least remembering his name and promotion.

Unfortunately it not that simple. People use the internet to find useful information and to save time. And the millions of people connected to the internet have millions of choices of things to read. It would be nice for internet businesses if they were the only business on the internet and a way could be found for every one of the millions of people out there to find their new internet address.

Will a fancy, snazzy page like the ones you can create with many of the latest web programs be good enough to get your site noticed on the web and remembered? Not likely. First, the ultimate success of marketing on the web is based on getting your address in front of the internet public and also the quality of the goods and/or service and information being offered. A fancy home page might temporarily excite people as they see it, but it will never overcome whatever else is lacking.

Secondly, a fancy home page will never even be seen if it's address is not promoted! How will people even know about your page? The well-known "search engines" now widely available may take up to several months to include your web address in their search engine. Then once it's available for searching, how many other web pages have exactly the same subject as yours? You may have one of thousands of web pages about "computers" or "real estate" or "schools", for example.

So the first thing you must ask yourself is: "Do I have a quality service or product that others want to pay for?" Or alternatively "Do I have information that people want to know about?"

The next question to ask is: "How much time and money do I want to invest in the probability that I can EITHER increase income through marketing my web page OR provide an informational service to the internet community that will be worth the time I spend building and promoting this web page?"

I have seen thousands of personal and business web pages that get minimal visitors in a month. How can you track the number of "visitors?" Notice that on many web sites the developer has placed a visible digital "counter" somewhere on the site. This literally counts the number of times someone has visited. The next time you are looking at a site look for the counter. If you are curious how many people visit it in a day, week or a month, come back a day, week, or month, later and see how much the counter has increased in that time period!

So one may ask why does someone spend literally hundreds of hours (yes, it will take that much of your time!) developing a web site that may only have a dozen or even a hundred visitors a month? In essence the developer has decided to spend one hour of his life to reach one visitor who may spend as little as one minute reading his web page! This is a very common occurance in the thousands of personal, business web pages and school web pages I have seen.

The question now is how can a web page author efficiently get more people to see his page? Remember that automatically the web address of the page will eventually be found on the web search engines that people use to find keywords and subject. But also remember that everyone else's web page address will also be found and you are therefore competing for attention against those other thousands of pages!

Therefore, you must find a way to promote your address that none of the other like-subjected pages are using. The most effective way to do this is find a web site that has something allied with your potential customers and information seekers.

I call this Piggy Backing.

Let's say you are a small community real estate company and want to put a web page online. You need look for some web developers in your local area who are getting a lot of attention (visitors) on their web sites. Once found, ask if they will put a link to your real estate pages on their web site. People looking at their popular site will also see your real estate company's name with a link directing them to your actual pages. In many cases, a web developer will do this for you free if you agree to put a similar link to their page on your site, and he expects that your web site will get sufficient visitors to help promote his site also. If he doesn's see that your site is popular or has something of interest to his readers he will not want to do it for free.

Mostly you will find that a wildly popular web site will not give you a free link, or if it is really free, the link will not be in a very highly visible place on their site. Therefore, you will have to decide to pay for a link on these popular web sites.

Now, we ALL want to get things for FREE! But this is one case where you get what you pay for. If you decide you really have a service, product or information that people would enjoy hearing about you really must move forward with a promotional budget to purchase the space on other popular web designer's web sites.

Typically, you can expect to pay from $5 to $150 monthly per thousand web visitors for this promotional exposure. Website proprietors now determine how many monthly visitors their site is receiving and adjust their promotion rates to reflect this number. This is just like newspaper and magazine advertising. The higher the circulation the more exposure your ad will get.

The difference is that the internet allows actual counting of the visitors while newspapers can only guess at the number of readers.

Let's say that a site you want to advertise on is getting 1000 visitors monthly. You can expect to get a link, banner, or mention on that site for between $5 and $150 monthly. The more specialized the web site the more you can expect to pay. Say you want to advertise your real estate company on a student school site or personal web page. You would most likely pay the lower figure per thousand vistors to that site. There aren't many students who are looking for a real estate company.

On the other hand, let's say you find a web site developed for residents and visitors in your city. Bingo! You've hit paydirt. Everyone who visits that web site is a potential customer to your real estate service! So you can expect to pay more for the more efficient marketing tool available using that web site for your promotions.

The bottom line, whether you have a personal web page or a business site, you must find an efficient way to advertise and promote your web page if you expect to market on the web successfully and have people know who and where you are. Find other web sites that cater to your typical customers and pay to put your links on them and plan an adequate promotional budget to pay for web advertising and promotion.