“The RoseBouquet”

Have you ever thrown a party, and hardly anyone came? These days lots of people are setting up websites, and when they think it is ready they wait for the visitors to come. Some friends straggle over to have a look, but if you had envisioned hundreds and thousands to come - it can be quite a disappointment.

I threw my first party after I lived alone in the city after high school graduation. As I recall only two friends came and they were not there at the same time. It discouraged me for a long time from trying such hospitality again. Gradually, with time, I learned that you have to develop relationships with people, and be content with small meetings and visits until you build up your circle of friends.

In the last ten years on the internet I’ve been learning similar lessons about getting visitors to come to my website. I worked so hard on my first free website in 1999. It was a chance to tell the world who I was and what I could do for them, and I even priced my services very reasonably so they would know I was not trying to be too big for my britches. Somehow I thought all the world could see my site from every corner of the globe.

Turned out they could not until they would learn about it on some other more popular site which they had already found. I was forced to read up on marketing and promotion and try a number of methods. Fortunately, I learned that even a po’ little church mouse like me could use all kinds of f ree marketing methods. Naturally, I jumped on a number of bandwagons. Some were more bother and bounce than they were worth.

Experience is a good teacher, and over the last number of years, certain methods have proven more effective than others. Those with the most success have shared their insights.

When you really want visitors to come to read your website, and to respond to your special offers, here are the best ways to invite them;

1. Build your website around carefully chosen keywords that are commonly searched in the search engines, and use those keywords often enough on your web pages, and list them in the meta tags, so that the search engines will offer up your site to seekers.

2. When your site is polished and appears as a nice, cohesive unit to human readers, with good internal linking and you have linked to good outside resources, it is time to get some quality in-bound links from other respectable sites with some authority in your field. You may have to provide a reciprocal link, but one of the best ways to get these is to submit your site to directories and other peers’ sites.

3. To build long term relationships with your visitors, which will bring them back repeatedly, you need to incorporate things like an ezine, or blog, or inter-active form. Set these up and prepare to give some time to this aspect.

4. Now it is time to go submit the URL to your site to the main search engines. When they see your use of keywords, and those inbound links, it convinces them that you are worthy of notice and indexing. The purpose-driven visitors will start drifting in.

5. But you can do some more to get your invitations out;
a). Put the link to your site in your email signature so it is added automatically.
b). Print some business cards to hand out as you meet people.
c). If you can afford it, pay for some pay-for-click ads at Googles AdWords.
d). Write articles on the main topics of your site, and list them on the better article directories, your bio box linking to your site.
e). Get a profile and login at various forums that relate to the topic of your site, with your URL in your signature, make helpful posts and become a polite and respected member.

If you continue with this kind of campaign for at least three to four months, you should start to get enough visitors to your site, and some of them contacting you for advice, and to pay for your products or services, to keep you fairly busy.

There will always be things to delay us and maybe frustrate us too, but if we have steps like this laid out so we can see the big picture, we can keep coming back to it, working on it, until we get results. By the time we get the results we want, we’ll also discover that we need to keep up with most of the steps to keep those visitors and results coming.