Rising Above the Competition Online
How will you make your Website stand out from the rest? Unless you are selling a very rare widget you can bet that there are a dozen more sites just like yours. Maybe even a thousand more. How will you drive traffic to your site and away from your competitions? You can spend a load on PPC. You can hire an excellent SEO person. You can stand on the highway with a sign that reads “visit my site.” But even with these techniques you may not be able to keep visitors long enough to convert. So what are you going to do to make your site different? Below are some ideas to make your site stand above the rest.
1. Become a trusted expert in your field. Easier said than done, but if you provide the information your visitor is looking for they will trust you over your competitors. If you are selling leopard geckos provide leopard gecko care sheets, leopard gecko breeding tips, pictures of leopard gecko morphs, etc.
2. Make your site a habit. Provide a daily blog, a message board, an RSS feed, and other tools that will bring visitors interested in your product or service back every day.
3. Write to your visitor. Make sure to provide what the visitor is looking for and not why you are the best. You can mention that you won this and that award, but the visitor is there to satisfy their own need – not to read about how great you are.
4. Use the tools of the Web. This one is a given but it’s easy to overlook things like press releases, email blasts, and social media sites that not only drive new visitors to your site but build your authority on the Internet. A good press release can sit at the top of Google News for days and drive valuable visitors to your site.
5. Market Offline. Print up business cards and give them to everyone you know; stick them in books at the bookstore, pass them out at conferences, and anywhere else you can think of.
Above are just a few ideas to get you started. The real point of this post is that it for a site to beat competition you must find unique promotional tools. SEO and SEM are great, but it takes “out of the box” thinking to stand out above the rest. Share your ideas below.