Putting videos on your website adds value to your websites value from the perspective of the end-user: your visitor.

Making Videos Can Be Fairly Simple

With today’s technology, producing short videos for display on your website is not difficult to do. Using the simplest of software found on any Windows computer (Windows Movie Maker) you can easily create a quick 30 to 60 second video to be placed on the product or service pages of your website.

Why would you want to do produce videos?

One reason would be to draw your visitor’s attention to a new product or service you’ve recently added to your line. Another would be to arouse your visitor’s interest in or increase their desire for a particular product or service. Yet another reason would be to deliver some breaking news or compelling information about the product or service.

Videos Help Attract Your Target Markets

Basically, using video on your site is just another way for you to provide your visitors with more relevant information, relative to what they came to your site looking for, in order to keep them on your website longer (the longer they are there, the more likely they will be to purchase) and to increase your visitor’s interaction with your business through your website.

How do you get the video to show up?

Putting video on your web pages is a simple matter of uploading the main video source file to your host server, and having your webmaster place a bit of code in the HTML of your web pages that calls the video source file, allowing your video to be seen by your visitors.

There are many great reasons to use video on your website.

You can use video not only to bring attention to your products and services, but also to provide contact information for your visitors to get in touch with you for more information about your business, products or services.

How-To Videos

Short videos could be created to demonstrate how to use one or more of your products, such as how to apply a facial mask. Simple 1-2-3 pictures with a few words of instruction would be plenty to get the point across.

The Power of Visual Images

The human mind is very visual. Remember, words create pictures in your customer’s minds but, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Just imagine what the value of a video would be …

Another way to increase traffic to your website is by writing articles. I recommend putting these articles onto a blog on your business domain, but you may also submit them to the popular article directories and other sites such as Squidoo and HubPages.

Why submit your articles to article directories such as Ezine Articles and Go Articles? Because these directories will “syndicate” your articles, meaning they let their visitors reprint your articles on their own websites as long as they credit you as the author and include the link back to your website – which should be in every resource box for every article you write and submit to such directories.

Why would you want to allow your articles to be syndicated?

Imagine a lady who sells perfume from her website comes across one of your articles about skin care. She feels the information is good, thinks her website visitors would benefit from reading it, so she places an authorized copy on her website for her viewers to read.

Per the syndicating site’s usage rules, she must leave your resource box intact on the article, and that article includes a link back to your website. You now have your own tiny little ad from this woman’s perfume site that leads to the skin care section of your own website. br>
Now you have generated an additional traffic source from a single article you wrote, simply by letting others reprint your article. Not only will you get traffic from the viewers who read your article at the article directory and want to know more, you will also get traffic from the perfume seller’s website visitors who read your article and want to know more.

But it doesn’t stop there. Imagine having 10 such articles being syndicated across other websites, or 100. Can you see the traffic generation potential in using this strategy for your business website?

Outsource Writing of the Articles

I realize as a business owner, you don’t have time to write a hundred articles although it is obvious the potential increase in traffic and profits makes using this strategy to drive traffic to your website well worth the time and effort.

YoYou don’t have to create the articles yourself. You can hire others to create articles for you, and even to place them in the article directories on your behalf.

Article Markeing = More Visitors to Your Site = $$$

Put this traffic generation method into place from the beginning, as soon as you decide to bring your offline business online, and you could be benefitting from increased traffic to your website right from the start.

One way to do this, if you truly have something valuable to say that you know many potential customers would like to know, is by starting a blog for your business website.

What is a “blog?”

When blogs first appeared online, the word “blog” was short for “web log” which was initially a type of online diary or journal in which people posted their thoughts. Their web log or “blog” was often updated daily.

Today, a blog would more accurately be defined as a chronological log of frequently updated information, published on a website.

Blogs Can Be Indistinguishable From Other Kinds of Websites In Appearance, Yet Offer More Features

When it comes to appearance, a blog such as those created by the Wordpress content management system, can be easily set up to look like a regular website.  Blogs come with a multitude of  potential functionalities from plugins.  Some plugins will add photo galleries to your blog, some can add a forum to your site. Pretty much anything you can imagine, there is probably a plugin for it.

Why would you want to use a blog in conjunction with your business website?

Just like with an autoresponder, your blog is used to provide your visitors with information … specific, relevant information about the products and/or services offered by your business. Your blog posts would be targeted to the wants and needs of your specific visitors and when used correctly, maintaining a blog will naturally create a feeling of authority and additional credibility for your business.

You would link from your blog posts to relevant products or services on your site, thus increasing traffic to your main website and potentially driving up sales.

Blogs Are Search Engine Optimized Right From the Get-Go

Another reason you might consider having a blog for your business is that blogs are better optimized straight out of the box for making your information easy to find online via the search engines.

I’ve had a number of my websites indexed by Google within 15 minutes simply by adding a blog to my website and posting to it.

Blogs Are Easily Well-Organized

Yet another reason you may want to utilize a blog for providing information to your visitors is because the information posted to your blog is well-organized.

The regular format of a blog it makes it easy for yourself and others to find information you’ve published, almost automatically, because your blog posts are organized by date, by category, and by post title.

Blogs Enable You to Quickly Connect to Your Target Market

When you realize that the faster you can get information about your products or services to your prospective buyers, the faster you will make sales, having a blog makes perfect business sense.

Blogs not only make disseminating information to your potential clients and customers simple and easy, they also give you the ability to do so super-fast.

Now that you have your new website online and have completed basic steps to make sure people can find you when they search by placing meta-tags on each of your web pages and a site map on your website, you may want to consider setting up a method that allows you to collect a list of names and email addresses from those people who are interested in receiving more information about the products or services you offer.

Online, this is called “list-building” and it really is nothing more than what it says:
building a list of contact names and email addresses to whom you have permission to mail information and offers.

Now, before you get the idea to start adding everyone and anyone to a list and start blasting out emails about your products or services, you should know there’s a law in effect which says you can’t just add people to a list like this. People have to request to be added, and also give you permission to contact them again later. Further, if anyone asks to be removed from your list, you must remove them.

List-building isn’t difficult. All you’ll need is an autoresponder service (for easier management of your contact list).

The cost is relatively inexpensive (about $19 a month or so) and the return on investment (from the ability to make additional sales you may not have made without having a list to contact and make offers to) makes using an autoresponder service well worth the investment – usually many times over.

Your autoresponder service provider will provide you with a bit of HTML code for you to place in the HTML of your web pages. Your webmaster can easily put this code on your web pages for you.

What the code does is make a “form” (called an “opt-in box”) show up on your website pages into
which your visitor can enter their name and email address, and it has a button for them to click that sends their information to your autoresponder service. Their information is added to a database for you to access later, when you are ready to contact your list.

By providing your visitors an “opt-in box” on every one of the pages in your website (or if this is not feasible, on every page where it makes sense) you are offering your visitor a chance to let you know they wish to receive more information from you about your products or services via email.

What information could you send them? Notices about a special you are having, or information such as a “Skin Care Basics” report, or Top 10 Beauty Tips to Enhance Your Natural Beauty tip sheet. There really is no limit to what you can send to your list as long as it is relevant.

One of the great things about using an autoresponder service and staying in contact with your list is that you’re able to include an offer in every email you send out. For example, if you were to send out a tips email like the one mentioned above, you might include an offer for Raw Mineral cosmetics at the bottom of that email with a link to Raw Mineral cosmetic products on your website where visitors could come for more information and to purchase Raw Mineral cosmetics.

You can do this for any product you carry or service you offer, and I am sure you will, now that you can easily see how doing so would increase your chances to make additional sales.

A site map is really nothing more than a simple table of contents that lists and links to all the relevant pages of your website – pages relevant to your visitors’ search for information, products, and services you provide.

If your website is only two levels deep, meaning your website only has a few pages other than the home page and your visitor can reach all of those pages from a link on your home page, a site map really isn’t necessary. Your navigation should be fine for helping visitors find their way around your site.
However, if your website contains second-level pages that link out to third and even fourth-level pages, it makes sense to provide a site map for visitors to find their way around your website. A site map on your web site functions just like a street map works to help people find your store or place of business offline.

A site map is usually constructed in “top down” order, meaning the first listing would be your Home page, and your second-level pages would be listed beneath it, with relevant third-level pages listed beneath second-level pages, and so on.

If you compared a site map to a Table of Contents such as might be found in a book, the first listing would be the book’s title. Below that, you might have a listing for each chapter in the book, and below each of those, you might have a listing of relevant topics covered in each chapter.
Here is an example:

Learn To Grow Ripe, Succulent Tomatoes

In the example above, “Learn to Grow Ripe, Succulent Tomatoes” is the Home page of the web site.
From this Home page, a visitor could click a link to a “section” of the web site that is all about starting their tomato garden using seeds that would later be transplanted into their garden. Thus the “Starting Your Tomato Plants From Seeds” page is a second-level page in the web site.

This second-level page would likely have links that branch off from the information provided on it to additional pages that provide even more in-depth tomato-growing, seed-choosing information, such as “How to Pick the Most Healthy Seeds.”

Finally, a visitor to this site might prefer to get seeds this site recommends directly from the site rather than try and locate them themselves offline, so there might be a fourth-level page where the web site allows their visitors to order seeds directly from their site.

After you’ve created your site map, be sure to link to it from your main navigation, which ideally appears on all the pages in your web site.

Contrary to popular opinion, people do not know you have a website simply because you created one, or had one created for you.

That said, one of the easiest ways to get the word out about your website is to get it listed in the search engines, so people who use sites like Google and Yahoo search can more easily find you on the World Wide Web.

How do you do get on the internet search engines?

Initially, you start with the two most basic steps: using meta-tags and creating a site map.

What are Meta-tags?

Meta-tags are small bits of HTML code you add to your web pages that provide the name/title and a description of your pages plus the top keywords a visitor could use to find your page if searching with those words. If you provide these, it makes it a lot easier for potential visitors to find you, even though meta-tags do not show up to your visitors on your web pages.

Your website visitors do not see them, but search engines do, and they use this information to help them properly list your website in their search results. How? The keywords you use in your meta tags help search engines understand the subject and type of information your website offers potential visitors.

This, in turn, allows the search engines to provide searchers with a more accurate, relevant list of web sites, based on the keywords used in the search, to visit and find what they were looking for.

How are meta-tags constructed?

What follows is a sample of a set of meta-tags containing meta-data (descriptions and keywords) that can be added to the HTML code of the pages of your website.
<meta-name=”description” content=”This is where you will add one or two sentences describing the content to be found on this page.>

<meta-name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyphrase”>

<title>This will be the title of your page</title>

Each page in your website will have meta-data that is slightly different from previous pages because each page in your website will contain different content but every page should contain at least this bare minimum of information.
Once you have your meta-tags in place, you can move on to the creation of your site map. We’ll talk about that in Getting Visitors To A New Business Website Part 2.

“What good is it going to do me to have a website online for my business?”

This is a very valid and logical question

As a business owner who is being asked to pay someone to create an Internet presence for your business, it should be understood that you would want to know – in detail – how this investment is going to make your business better.

A responsible Internet consultant will be prepared and readily able to answer this, your most pressing question, with the truth – having a business presence online (a website) can help you get more new customers for your business while also making a way for you to sell more, more often, to your existing customers. Having a website online to represent your offline business can and often does add additional revenue to your offline business endeavors – many times in ways you hadn’t thought of before.

The Internet has opened doors previously closed all across the board.

Bringing your offline business online should be considered a logical step in growing your business to the next level, one previously unavailable – especially on such a large scale – to small, local businesses. Why? It simply shows good business sense to seek out and utilize all possible avenues of gaining new customers and greater profits for your business.

Of course there is more to getting new customers and selling more than simply putting up a website, and all of your concerns should be fully addressed.

A reliable Internet consultant will be able to explain to you the various ways and methods you and he (or she) will use to get traffic to your site, to engage your website visitors, and finally to make sales to those visitors – both during their visits to your site and after those visitors have left your website – by keeping in touch with them through email and other marketing strategies.

These ways and methods will generally by necessity (since your business is offline, local, and very frequently “unique”) consist of a set of custom-designed plans related specifically to your business, with the strategic focus fully on reaching and bringing in your target market.

Are you ready to grow your business?

If you hadn’t previously considered bringing your offline business online because you were uncertain how doing so could benefit you and your business, this might be a good time to give it some thought, since you now know doing so certainly could increase your sales and greatly expand your customer base.