Once you’ve got your website up and running, actually, even AS the website is being prepared (by you or someone you hired to do it) you should begin marketing. Be sure to put your web address on your business cards, magnets, anything you send out to leads – actually anything you send out PERIOD. Your website is just another piece of contact info, as important as adding your name or phone number to a marketing piece.

You have a long list of contacts in your email address book, right? Send out a mass e-mail announcing the launch of your website and what it can offer – being sure to BLIND CARBON COPY (or BCC) everyone, so you’re not letting everyone who receives the email see everyone elses’ email address.

Now it’s time to move online to draw traffic to your site. There are typically two types of ways to get visitors to your site: paid advertising and unpaid advertising or search engine optimization. Paid advertising is fairly simple to set up, but can cost a fair amount of money. Search engine optimization (SEO) is about getting natural or organic traffic to your site, by making it so useful it ranks in the search engine results for certain keywords.

For instance, if you are a Salt Lake City agent and people looking in for real estate information would go to Google and type in something like “Salt Lake City real estate” or “Realtor in Salt Lake City” you would want your website to pop up for those terms, right?

Right. In simple terms, that’s what SEO is: doing certain things to get your website popping up in the top 10 results in search engines. This usually involves having great content, keyword research, and link building. We get more in depth about SEO in our Search Engine optimization piece, so you can check that out if you’re interested.

As for paid advertising of your website, have you ever noticed that when you do a search on search engines like Google or Yahoo, you get the normal 1-10 results per page (called organic results), but you’ll also get a few results on the right hand side of the screen or right at the top? Those are paid advertising called sponsored listings and you pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your listing. In Google the system is called AdWords, and you read more about it here. In Yahoo, the system is simply called Yahoo Search Marketing. They both have their pros and cons and you can find out more on them by visiting each site.

Google AdWords or Yahoo SM campaign goes something like this:

• You research keywords and compile a list of terms people are likely to use when searching for a product/website like yours.
• You sign up for an AdWords or SM campaign, and they’ll give you the guidelines for designing your text ad (how many lines, how many characters, etc)
• You decide how much you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your listing.
• The more websites competing for a particular keyword, the higher you may have to pay per click to have your site come up in the sponsored listings
• You complete your text ads, run your campaign and wait for the traffic to start coming into your site.

There are also various paid and unpaid website directories you may submit your site to. You can search for terms like “best real estate directories” or “free real estate directory submission” to find sites to submit your website to. You can also search for “real estate blog directories” or something similar to find places to submit your blog. Do your research before submitting, you want to find directories with good reputations that will send some traffic your way.

A great human-edited search directory is DMOZ, but their admission standards are pretty strict, so it can be tough to get in. Don’t let that stop you, submit your site anyway, because it can’t hurt. It’s best to do a combination of paid and free directories to get your link up in a few places, but don’t overdo it with the directories. Again, we stress researching a directory before submitting your link to it, as there ARE sites out there that have been banned from search engines for bad practices.

Learning the ins and outs of Internet marketing and drawing traffic to your site can take a while, but the information is out there on the web, so just do some research yourself! If you have a passion for computers, the Internet and all things technological, you will find it really rewarding educate yourself on these topics and use them as you go along. If you’re not a huge fan of the Internet, you can always hire someone more savvy than you. Either way, if you don’t take advantage of all the Internet can do for your business, you’re definitely doing yourself a disservice.