I have a brand new website – now what?

Monday, 25 October 2010 16:31

So you've spent months and thousands of dollars getting it perfect and bringing your new website to life.

Now what?

One things for sure, sitting back and waiting for the phone calls, email enquiries and sales to come rolling in is probably not a winning strategy!

In many ways, the hard work has only just begun.  Unless you've signed up for a website management plan, you'll have to devote some time and effort to your new site.  

There will be a settling in period - as you make sure any errors have been found and fixed and you tweak a few others. 

After that, here's some of the things you can do straight away:

• Make sure your website address is on your business card, your email signature, pens and t-shirts
• Tell everyone on your contact list about the new site and what it offers them
• List in the online directories – eg NZS.com, Finda, Yellow Pages etc
• Get familiar with your reporting tool such as Google Analytics. This will tell you who is coming to your site, from where and what they are doing when they get there. This is vital information for you to use to improve either the number of visitors you are getting and/or the number of those that pick up the phone and/or buy something! 
• Consider a SEO campaign to increase the number of visitors Google, Bing and Yahoo send your way.  SEO is a complex area, but takes time so the best time to start is today!
• Consider how best to monitor your search engine rankings.
• Practise on your CMS so you don't forget how to use it! 
• Come up with a list of new content to add to your news, FAQs etc you can add over a period of time to keep the site fresh.
• Ask your customers for testimonials to add to the site
• Set up a Facebook page and/or Twitter account for your business. Start growing your fan base or followers and post updates that link back to your site or new products.
• Set up Google alerts for your industry. This is an easy source of news and information that you can use to add content to the news section or blog on your site
• Consider paid advertising such as Google Adwords. You may want to set up your campaign so that the goal is to get people to sign up to your email newsletter then you can market to these people on an ongoing basis
• Think about creating a brochure, do a mail-drop in selected areas or do other off-line promotional activities.
• Consider running a competition or other incentive-based campaign.
• And while you are building up your visitor numbers - be patient and be persistent!

It's never to late:

If you didn't do it as part of the planning phase of your website design project:

• Prepare content in advance and schedule it to be publish it over time.  Tips and advice, product reviews - that type of thing works well
• Refine your keyword phrases
• Check out your competition for ideas on what more you could do.  Don't just look local - look at national and international organisations who are in the same business.