Getting started with website marketing

1. Set one numerical goal for your site, have a plan to achieve it and ruthlessly measure progress towards it.
   
2. Each month update your site at least once and revise the copy on your pages to get the key words nearer the top, in the page titles and headings, in the text you use to describe the pictures and in the links between pages.
   
   Each month add the site to five free directories and search engines and check where you are on the earlier ones and what key words are working well
   
3. Each month get three other sites to link to yours. The more popular they are, the better. Search engines love sites that are well linked.
   
4. Ask five people who care about your website but are not familiar with it to perform the same task, one you'd like a potential customers to do easily and intuitively. Get them to tell you how well it works, every last detail, warts and all. Every single one of the hundreds of websites we've seen have had something that got in the way of visitors actually completing a task.
   
5. Each week, check your site for pages that are slow to download, or missing pictures, or have links that are broken. Links to other sites suffer from linkrot, as the site at the other end changes. Which unfairly makes you look bad.
   
6. Sign up for just one of the many online marketing newsletters and apply one technique each month.
   
7. Measure the number of visitors, which websites and search engines sent them, where they arrived and what they did. Look for one way to change the behaviour of visitors to what you want them to do.
   
8. Ask your ISP to tell you how well it performed in making your website available and quickly serving pages. Or use one of the many available tools to tell you independently.
   
9. Decide on a couple of words that a customer might use to describe your business. Type them into a search engine. If you're not in the first couple of pages of results you are invisible. Then look at the records kept by your ISP to see what words real visitors used to find your site and choose the best ones.

The saying "Can't measure it, can't manage it" applies online just like anywhere else. Yet if you are measuring the number of people who come to your website and convert to customers and if you are measuring the ability of your website to provide a memorable experience and keep visitors coming back, you are in a tiny minority; most do not bother. Keep doing it though - the word is spreading fast. The quick wins that we can help you gain  will be much scarcer a year from now as your competitors get wise.