Offline businesses need the internet, too.
Are you encouraging people to visit your website?
Even though you have an offline business and you’re not an internet marketer this is something you need to do.
After all, you’ve done a lot of work on your website. It looks nice. You like the content. You’ve done some work on search engine optimisation, too.
Perhaps you’ve been thinking that you’ve done the work and you can now sit back and maybe forget all about your site.
If you think this, you’re wrong.
There’s a lot you need to do to help to make your website an asset for your business. You need to be active in promoting your site, even if you’re not actually selling anything.
Knowing this gives you an advantage. Lots of businesses just expect web traffic to turn up.
In fact, you need to work hard to encourage visitors to come – and then return to – your website.
Your website in the online hub of your business. It’s where people go to find out more about you. It’s where people go to decide whether or not to start to build a relationship with you and your business.
Make your hub busy. Work hard to increase your traffic.
Website traffic – where does it come from?
Traffic to your website comes from three principal sources.
- Traffic comes from the search engines.
- Traffic comes from referring sites.
- Traffic comes directly to you site. That means that people who know your URL (your website address) type the details into their browsers.
Today I’m writing about how you can encourage more direct traffic. This is something lots of businesses never do, so you’ll be gaining a huge advantage is you follow this advice.
Web traffic – how can you get more of it?
Let’s consider what you can do in the offline world to get more people to visit your site. The good news is that all of these strategies are directly under your control.
- Ask your customers and others you meet to take a look at your website.
Simple.
Just remember to give them a reason for visiting your site.
- Ask people to take a look at something on your website or to download something from your website.
We have a free Twitter guide that visitors can download without needing to sign up for anything. I regularly suggest customers and prospective customers visit and download.
- Tell your customers they can find out more about your products and services on your website.
Tell them they can look at your products online. You have pictures of what you do. You have videos and similar on your site. People can see your work at their leisure.
This is a great way to get people actually to look in detail at your offer. They can find specifications. Maybe they can find videos and other useful material. They can find everything they want to know. You make information readily available to them in an interesting format.
- Send people links.
Let’s think about this one. You’ve met someone at a networking meeting. You talk about a subject. Then you offer to send a link to a really useful article you’ve written on that subject.
You follow up on your commitment and you send the link. Once again you’re encouraging people to visit your website.
Your offline business needs a great website
Of course, your website needs to be more than an online brochure for you to adopt these strategies successfully.
These days more and more offline businesses are realising they can use their websites to do more than upload a brochure. More and more offline businesses are working hard to make their websites useful to their customers and prospective customers.
You need to make sure you’re doing this, too.
Make your offline business’s website a source of guidance and support to all your customers and people you would like to do business with. They’ll start to position you as an expert in your niche, if you do this.
What now?
If you like this post then please press the “like” button and tweet about it. You can ask questions about how to get more visitors to your offline business’s website below. You can also ask your questions over on Facebook at The Social Media Success Community’s page.
I’m always happy to help.
See also:
Three reasons why your offline business needs a blog.
In the next post I’ll deal with getting more traffic to visit your website from referring sites.
About Margaret Adams
I followed everything written here my website stats have increased by 10,000 yes 10,000 were i was only getting daily of 500 with possibly 2 sales a fortnight, now i ham doing 5 saleseveryother day thanks you verymuch.
Montu Azlann
Sounds impressive. Well done!