NewslettersYour Website is your best promotional tool. Make sure that the URL (address of your site) appears on all your documents such as business cards, invoices, ads in the paper, brochure(s), products you are selling and why not on your vehicle. The more your domain name appears in the real world, the more chances people will get to visit you.
Keep information current on your site; email address, phone and business address. It is important that you keep these things up- to- date to avoid any confusion for your customers.
Try to add new information on your site; at least once a week (or once a month). Open a blog if you can, or a newsletter. Just one page where you write what is happening in your business will do. Link your site to other sites and get them to link to yours. If you can get them to link to your site, without your linking to their site (that's the most difficult part) that's even better. You could ,for example, participate in a forum on arts and insert a link to your website. Make sure the link is relevant.
Open a Facebook and/or Twitter account. But if you do that make sure you commit to your Twitter or Facebook account. If you never publish anything on your social networking account(s), people won't come and "Follow you" unless you are J.K Rowling (J.K. Rowling has almost 650, 000 subscribers but only 7 tweets). Use your account to link to your site.
These days everyone is talking about SEO and SEM. Though the two are similar, one will cost you money and the other involves a lot of work. If you want to try SEM (Search Engine Marketing) you can test adwords (from Google) for free. Google is doing a promotion on the web to sell its adwords program. Be careful if you use adwords, to set-up a very low budget (for example $8 per day). Some keywords can be very expensive. Unless you sell a lot you may end up with a huge adwords bill. The other way of advertising on the net is called "Organic". This is the growth process that will take a lot of time and patience. It is also referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There are a lot of articles on the Web about SEO. Google even has a page on how to get better page ranking in its search engine.
There are some tricks you can use to get to the very top of a search result, but people who know these tricks won't share with you unless you pay them a substantial amount of money. For example, how did they get the term "miserable failure" to go to George W. Bush's Biography page? Someone knew of a loop into the Google search engine and used it. It used to be a lot easier to trick Google to rank these pranks at the top of search results. Some tricks were also used for commercial purposes. These days, Google is doing everything it can to diffuse these bombs. Now, a lot of work and effort is what you need. So keep trying and don't get discouraged.
Latest tip......
There are a lot of functions included in your Joomla site:
Banners will allow you to advertise on your site.
Latest news and Newsflash can be used to display your news in scrolling windows .
Random images will just do that - display random images in a box.
There are thousand of modules that can be added to your site.
If there is a functionality you would like to have on your site, please inquire.
