With over 82% of people looking to search engines to find local information, creating a web presence for your business is a must in today’s standards. Whether you create a simple website, an online store, a blog, a network of blogs, or a handful of social media profiles, your web presence is your window to the millions of people online.

So what then? Once you’ve built a web presence for your business, what do you do with it?

Drive Traffic

Be careful not to assume that traffic is automatic. Even if you spend thousands of dollars creating a spectacular website, blog, and social media presence, you still need to focus on the next step - if you don’t, creating such a presence would be a waste of time and money.

Here are just a few ways to drive traffic to your web presence

• Write helpful content
• Share links on Twitter and Facebook
• Create a Facebook group focused on a niche in your field
• Advertise with the search engines - PPC enables advertisers to
• Partner with other sites or companies
• Sponsor a contest
• Be active with your social profiles
• Add value to the communities online (reviews, comments, suggestions)
• Contribute to the many forums in your niche
• Donate your help to someone online
• Create an eBook and give it away for free
• Bookmark your content - social bookmarking can create a large spike in traffic, which can help attract a few more steady customers
• Create helpful videos (explain a process or something of great interest)
• Disagree with an authoritative voice in your niche
• Add different values to different social networks - diversify!

The key to successfully making these and other methods of driving traffic work is to focus on your goal.

Think of your web presence as your sales team - they should be optimized and designed to effectively make the correct impression on your visitors and lead them toward a sale. If you find that after your build traffic and you’re experiencing quite a bit of it, yet you’re not making sales, consider analyzing your stats to see what pages have the highest exit rates. This will tell you where people are leaving your site, and hopefully you’ll be able to optimize that page in effort to keep them hooked until their sold on your services or product.

Once you’re site is optimized with a clear call of action and low exit rate, try focusing your efforts online to driving people to your site. Again, see the list of examples for some ideas.

There’s no right and wrong here … just what works and what doesn’t. If you find that one method isn’t working, try another then repeat the process.

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