Top 10 Small Business Website Marketing Tips

If you’re running a small business and just now getting started with website marketing, I’ve got some great tips to help you get started. But these tips are just as valuable for veteran online marketers, too. It’s a good idea to always learn as many website marketing tips as you can to keep sharpening your saw.

Here are my 10 favorite small business website marketing tips to help you get better results with your website:

1. Turn your website into a lead generation machine.
   The point of a website is not to make sales. The point of a website is to capture leads. Never forget that. Every single page on your website should be focused around capturing new leads by obtaining name and email at the very least.

2. Use email marketing to follow-up with your leads.
   When I use the term “website marketing” I’m really talking about everything that happens online, and that includes email. As I pointed out above, your first objective is to capture new leads. Once you have those new leads, you need to build an email marketing follow-up system to stay connected to them.

3. Blog frequently and consistently to build search engine presence.
   To get email leads that can grow your business, you need people to visit your website. To get website visitors, you need lots and lots of content. Your prospects are using Google every day to search for what they want. One of the most reliable ways to show up in Google results is to blog about lots of topics your customers care about.

4. Follow the new SEO rules — not the old SEO rules.
   Chances are good you’ve already done some research about Online Marketing. And chances are also good that you’ve read a few things about SEO. Just be sure you’re making a distinction between “Old SEO” strategy and “New SEO” strategy. The Old SEO stuff is manipulative and wonky. It’s all about link building and other weak practices. The New SEO stuff is about quality and value. It’s all about content, authority, and reputation.

5. Build an active presence on the top social media networks.
   When your prospects aren’t using Google, they’re using Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LInkedIn, and Pinterest. You need a presence on at least 3 of these top 5 networks. Ideally, you should be updating them several times each week or even every single day if possible.

6. Focus on the most important rule in marketing: Content Is King!
   Burn this one into your brain forever. This is the golden rule of marketing — Content Is King! It’s the rule you need to follow in every medium where you’re creating new marketing messages: email, blogging, social media, web content, etc.

7. Learn everything you can about Direct Response Marketing.
   If you took a marketing class in college, you can pretty much throw everything you learned (including the textbook) right out the window. Branding and institutional advertising is for corporations with multi-million dollar advertising budgets. You need to follow the rules of direct response marketing to be sure you get measurable, trackable results.

8. Remember that Web Marketing is still just marketing.
   The goal of marketing is to grow your business. If you’re not doing that, then what’s the point? There are plenty of talking heads out there that will try to convince you that your online marketing strategy needs to be like a secret covert option to make your prospects your best friends rather than making them your best customers. It’s simply not true. Your number one goal is to grow your business.

9. Combine offline marketing with online marketing.
   Yes, it’s true, print media is still alive and well. It might seem strange that I’m suggesting offline marketing in a list of online marketing tips. But when in doubt, just read tip #8 above.

10. Test, track, measure, and improve your results.
    This is the most critical item on the list. If there’s any massive advantage that web marketing has over any other form of marketing, it’s that tracking and analyzing is far easier in this environment. Be sure you’re constantly measuring what you’re doing for best results.

Small Business Website Marketing Tips
I wrote this list to be punchy and direct so you can take quick action on at least a few of these items right away. Remember: all the theory and ideas in the world won’t help you if you don’t actually take action. Speed of implementation is the key to long-term success in business.

Please feel free to leave questions in the comments section.