new web page?????? advertising

[hunny]

Can anyone tell me in simple terms how to get my web page noticed!!!
I have created my web site and need to market it now but dont quite understand the procedure. Is it an 'adwords' package that I need or something similar? I want to keep my budget low to start. Any suggestions?
Many thanks in anticipation.

www.noiseairconsultants.co.uk

[top-click]

Hi - in simple terms,

If you want people there today Pay-Per-Click is for you - you don't need a vast budget to get results, and if it is working properly, you should get a pretty rapid return on investment.

If you can wait, SEO search engine optimisation can benefit you - like pay-per-click you can either pay someone to do this for you or DIY. Either way you need to decide whether you have the time, experience and inclination to do it!

There are many people on this forum that can help you out with both routes.

The longer answer to your question is you have a whole raft of 'marketing tools' to add to your mix - some will get you results quickly and some less so - banner advertising, radio ads, PR to name a few.

Again, there are people on this forum which can help - but feel free to tap me for some advice if you want to!

Regards
Rob

[hunny]

Thanks Rob, I will try pay per click first. Is this ie google 'adwords'?
I have also been trying to get posted on the free directories. I am given a code to add to my page?? if I copy the code where do I put it??
I am sorry to sound dumb.
Regards,
Anne.

[Rob Holmes]

Yes Robs right,

Theres short medium and long term.

If your keen to get results today with little effort then Pay Per Click would supply this - but it's obviously not the only way.

If you don't mind me saying I believe you need to change your website to help visitors and search engines navigate your site a little more easily. Restrict the width to a max of 780 pixels wide and make the photos larger or 'zoomed' in a little more, put yourself in the mind of your ideal customer and write directly to them one-to-one on the webpage.

Make it easy for them to contact you like hyperlinking the contact page and email address, and have an email address using your domain name it looks much more professional.

For the medium term, get your site optimised, there are a few people that could help you do this, if you did it yourself it's free (except your time and effort) or someone here can do it for you - or go 50/50 get a seo report and then just follow the instructions.

Then longer term build an email mailing list, this becomes invaluable once it gets fairly large, just keep in touch with people on a month by month basis, reminding them of who you are, how people have benefitted from using you and then a good snippet of information to ensure they don't unsubscribe.

This is just a few of a zillion ways but it's better to do one or two well than 20 half done ;)

I'm sure others will add more so I suggest you wait a bit and get some more suggestions and then start with what you like the sound of best.

The key to it all is testing, recording, tweaking and testing again until you have a documented step-by-step way of turning on the sales tap as and when you need to :)

Rob

[top-click]

Hi Anne - first the free directories, this is not my area but to be honest I think sites with loads of links to 'free this' and 'free that' look a bit amateurish - but that's my opinion!

IM me with regards to the Adwords stuff, I'll give you a hew tips to get you off to a flier - my IM is rbudd6@hotmail.com

Cheers

[hunny]

Hi Rob,
Thanks again for the advice, its really helpful to get some practical user friendly tips. my daughter has designed the web site and any more advice on improvement would be most gratefully received.
Regards,
Anne

[hunny]

Thanks for all your help today Rob - top man

[top-click]

My pleasure - I thnk you mean me ;)

R

[epiphany]

I wont go into marketing as this has already been excellently explained :)

The advice I would give you is this, you could have the best internet marketing in the world and bring plenty of people to your site but then you need to rely on your site to convert the hits to sales. Currently the website you are using is very poor and I would be seriously worried about how many of your hits that is going to convert to sales.

I am NOT saying this to be offensive so please don't take it that way, I realize your daughter will have put a lot of effort into the site and it would be hard to tell her you are not going to use the design but it will do more harm than good to use it. I know I am a web designer and it is in my interest to tell you to get it designed by a professional but seriously buy a template and get your daughter to edit it or something. I realize design is a subjective matter so you can ignore my opinion with relish: but it will cost you in the long run.

If you actually want my critique of everything I would change on the site then just post in here and i will give you a list. I don't mind spending the time if you are open for suggestions :)

[Amber]

I think this is a very important point.

It's one thing to drive traffic to a site, but it's another matter altogether to actually convert that traffic to sales. If you're relying on pay per click for traffic you could find yourself paying for visitors who won't turn into customers.

I am not a designer, and as Epiphany says, design is very subject, but at the moment your website wouldn't convince me to buy from you because it just doesn't look professional. I think it could be a good idea to spend some time bringing the site up to standard before you spend money advertising it.

Just my opinion, of course - feel free to ignore :)

[headway]

Overture or Google AdWords is really the only effective and fastest solution for you. Both systems allow you to budget your marketing expenditure

[hunny]

thankyou to everyone today for your advice, I am now re-looking at making changes and improvements. Epiphany, your list would be appreciated and used as constructive.

[epiphany]

OK a few simple points to make it look better.

(for simplicity I will boil the image advice to just jpg and gif format)

Firstly you need to compress the all the images on the site, the front page has 2megs of images, you can get that down to 20k in total. Check out mrc 20glasgow 20ring_with_hats, on the top right of the home page, its 1.5 meg :-(

There are other image issues as well, for instance the buttons down the left have a green to white gradient. The original should be saved in jpg format to avoid the dotted pattern you have across the gradient. This is caused by saving as gif with dither.

The dotted background image, up top, behind your logo looks terrible, I would just suggest making that one colour, i.e. the blue in the logo, while keeping the same shape. Save it as a gif with no dither and the file size will be super small. Also internet explorer has automatically added padding on the top and the left of the page so there is a gap all the way around this image which looks bad, rectify this.

The width of the page has already been mentioned, people hate scrolling sideways so you need to either make a site that contracts and expands depending on the browser window size or you need to just make the whole thing thinner. You will be safe at 800px wide :-)

Make the heading text smaller, much smaller! Having it the same size as the normal text and making it bold is usually OK.

I hope you find the advice useful :)

[hunny]

thanks for your comments, all your points have been noted and we will now concentrate on rectifying and improving the site
many thanks for your help

[top-click]

Hi hunny - get a few testimonials on there from satisfied customers!

R
Top-Click

[annethedonn]

Hi Hunny

Give Sophie Castell a call - she's a marketing strategist and offered me some very helpful advice - she was actually responsible for the Diet Coke Break adverts so knows her stuff. Her email is sophie@sophiecastell.com

www.sophiecastell.com

Mention my name if you would

thanks

Anne