Time to Launch

There are two very distinct phases to a website: (1) Design and (2) Marketing. In my opinion, far too many people spend way too much time on #1 and not enough time on #2. That is easy to do. All of us want to have a website which looks great and functions the way we need it. Those of us who do it ourselves can go around in circles trying to make it absolutely perfect before launch. Those of you who do not know how to design and program a website will hire developers to do it for you. However, many web designers and developers know not the first thing about marketing the website. They simply design the site, hand it over to the client, and leave with check in hand. Simply put, no website, no matter how well programmed and designed, is going to matter if people are not visiting it. And simply launching a website by uploading it is not going to attract anybody. So, the question is: how do you launch a website and actually get people to come to it?

A Word on the Design Phase, First

A big part of your overall marketing plan is, of course, the way the site is put together in the first place. The design of your site needs to relay the message you want your visitor to duplicate. Not only that, you want the words on your site to communicate not only to your visitors, but also to the search engines. It is the science of search engine marketing that is going to determine just how quickly your launch will work. Poor SEO (search engine optimization) will mean your site will not target the search engines well. Good SEO means that your launch campaign will bring in search engines and that those search engines will be able to spider your site accurately and effectively from day one. Think about your SEO strategy as you design the website. I am not going to get into SEO specifics in this article, but here are a few basics:

• Use an effective title, with strategic keywords placed in it. Titles are just strongly by search engines.
• With a strong list of keywords that target your market, make sure the writing on your site has those keywords interlaced within it.
• Use meta keywords and description tags. Some search engines still use this.
• Try to use a design that is not cluttered and makes good use of CSS. You want your source code to be clean because that is what search engines will be viewing. HTML source code which is cluttered with nested tables and other eye candy makes scanning for the actual text that much more difficult.

Generate Some Hype

One thing that is usually a good idea, depending on your site, is to generate some hype before the site actually launches. Putting up a boring “under construction” page doesn’t get anything useful done because nobody is going to care and nobody is going to bookmark you for coming back later. It is a waste of everyone’s time. But, to plan out some marketing gimmick ahead of time and use a simple placeholder page for that gimmick can gain a little buzz about your site. You could, for example, produce a Flash-based commercial for your new site and run that on your site with a “Coming in 2006″ type message at the end of it. You could promote a launch special or prize and use the placeholder page to collect email addresses for the prize. I cannot tell you what to do here. The trick is to be creative and do something that suits your business or website. Whatever you come up with, you can even generate some press about it using some promotion techniques. There’s no rule saying you need to wait until your site launches to do a little marketing.

Launch Time

The entire reason why I wrote this article is because the actual process of launching a website is utterly boring. You simply upload your site into the public HTML folder so that it is web viewable. Whoope Doo. Without some marketing, your site is no better off and is not serving your business any better after this is done than it was before. Nobody is looking at it, even though at this point they could if they wanted to. So, what are we going to do about that?

If your business already has another web presence on the internet, you can taker advantage of it to cross-promote your new website. Have your current site link to and announce the new site. You will see some residual traffic creep over to your new site. That is a start.

Many new webmasters do not have any pre-existing website online to bring traffic over, so you are starting from scratch. You are a new player in the field, so your first step is to get yourself onto the communication lines of the world. In fact, the general procedure you want to follow here is:

1. Find all the communication lines having to do with your new venture.
2. Get yourself onto those lines and get yourself known.
3. Find out what your new public needs and wants from you.
4. Do that.

So, your first step is to do some research and find all the possible lines where your potential public would be. Find your site’s competitors, online forums, print media – anything. Then, working with your budget, of course, get your message out onto these lines of communication. Announce who you are, what you are doing, and use your site to get information from your new visitors on what they need and want from you. You might employ an online survey or poll system to do this. It is imperative, though, that you put your new venture in front of the eyes of as many potential public as you can. Let’s look at some ideas on how to do that:

• Run a press release. A properly written press release released on the news wires can generate some buzz for you. Small business news wire services like PRNewswire and PRWeb are good places to check out. They are also convenient because they help get your message in front of press contacts from one central place, whereas it would take you forever to hit them all one by one. There is no guarantee that any print media will pick up your release and run with it, but again, its all about getting noticed at this point.
• Run some advertising. If your new site targets the same audience as another website or print publication, look into putting some advertising up onto those mediums.
• Get some reciprocal links. Go out and find those sites which will have similar audiences to you and form a link exchange with them. Incoming links from related sites really help your search engine ranking.
• Distribute some content. Write some free content having to do with your business and distribute it freely across the major content hub websites such as GoArticles.

Post Launch

If you ran your launch campaign correctly, you probably got a big (and probably momentary) spike in traffic to your new site. Likely, the traffic faded off and settled into a new range. Should you then sit back and hope it slowly rises? Probably not. If your marketing worked at launch, it will work other times as well. Obviously you don’t want to issue the same launch announcements over and over again, but this is where your marketing department (or yourself if you do your own marketing) need to get creative. The basic thing here is that you need to maintain a constant stream of PR flowing from your business out to the world. If you let it fade out, your traffic will be low. It usually takes some real time and sweat to get a website up to a point where its own inertia drives in traffic. Until that happens, you need to pour on the promo as much as possible to keep people coming in. And when you find what is working, you keep doing it.

The last thing I will mention is that you use those traffic spikes to apply #3 and #4 above. You constantly find out what those visitors want. Why did they come to your site? What were they hoping to get or see? Then, you do those things. This way, even after your traffic spikes subside, you have valuable information which will serve you well on your next promotional round.

With that, good luck with your next website launch!