Posts Tagged ‘Target Market’

There are many advantages to having a website. Just a few of them include being able to market your business globally, being able to accept orders while you sleep, and allowing people to receive information about your business in real time.

When you put your site online, you have a couple of choices. You can use a free web host or you can pay for web hosting. Your web host is the company that transmits your site onto the World Wide Web.

Web hosting is very affordable, and even those on the tightest budgets should make this a priority. Here are a few reasons why hosting your own site is the better alternative.

First and foremost, using a paid web host will keep your business image professional. When you use a free web host, you may look cheap or inexperienced. That isn’t the image you want to project to potential customers.

Many providers of free web hosting will display banner ads across their users’ sites. Since they are not receiving revenue through payment for their web hosting services, they need to earn revenue somehow. And so, these companies either display their own ads or the ads of others’.

As a user, you have no control of which ads are displayed. These ads could potentially offend your target market. If, by chance, the ad has something to do with the content on your page, your website visitor may click the ad, leave your site, and purchase an item from the other company instead of purchasing your product.

Many web hosts offer great customer support – to their paying customers. If you choose to use a free web host, they may only offer limited support or no support at all. If you have trouble transferring files or something of that nature, you may be left to figure it out by yourself. This can cause a lot of frustration.

Depending on the company you purchase your web hosting from, various features and benefits will be included. Some common features and benefits include message boards, online photo albums, blogs, shopping carts, and more. These items may not be included in the free web host plans.

When you pay for your web hosting, your web host company will guarantee the amount of time your website will be up and running. Usually, the guarantee rate falls between 95 and 99 percent. Free web hosts do not guarantee how much “up time” you will have. If your website is only up 50% of the time, you are potentially losing 50% of any traffic you send to your site.

As you can see, paying a small monthly fee to a web host is well worth the money. You can find web hosting for under $4 per month. Some companies will allow you to host unlimited sites for under $10 per month.

There is no question that blogs are great for business. When you blog, you can connect with your target market and promote your product(s). Blogger is a free, easy to use blogging service offered by Google. Using this service can be a great way to market your business.

When you use a service such as Blogger, you can create posts that explain the features and benefits of your product in a subtle way. For instance, if you have an information product on growing tulips, you can create posts that give a bit of helpful information. At the end of the post you can add “for more information ”.

If you have a physical product, you can create similar posts, giving people reasons to buy your product. If you happen to sell kitchenware, you could create an informative post about the benefits of silicone bake ware. You can add pictures of your product to your post and include a link to the page where your readers can buy the bake ware.

Blogs serve as a great communication tool. You can keep your readers up to date with any changes you have made to your site, provide information on new products you are going to be introducing, and receive feedback on the types of products your customers wish you would develop.

Another way to communicate with your target market and position yourself as an expert is to establish a “question of the week” feature to your blog. Simply have your readers send in their questions, and then, one day each week, choose one of the questions to answer. Your readers will look forward to this interactivity and will take note to visit each week to see if their question was chosen.

You can also use Blogger to increase the size of your mailing list by adding a sign up form to your newsletter or other autoresponder list. Once people are subscribed to your newsletter, you can continue to market to them.

Adding links back to your website on your blog will also help your website gain search engine traffic. The search engines crawl the Internet, and when a site has a lot of links coming into it, the search engines take notice. This can help your website rise in the results pages when someone performs a search using one of the keywords on your page.

These are just a few of the reasons why it is important to have a blog and how you can use a service like Blogger for marketing purposes. As you get more familiar with blogging, you can add an RSS feed to your blog, which will notify your readers that you have created a new post. This will keep your readers coming back regularly, and further help your marketing efforts.