Building a website is just the beginning of the journey towards successful e-Business. Once you have a site, it’s just like having an additional store in a mega mall called the Internet. Without visitors to your online store, you will not even have a chance to sell your products no matter how great your products are!

Therefore, we need to allocate our resources for promotions and marketing of the website. There are various tools available, depending on your budget, time and resources.

The first step towards driving more traffic to the website, starts with the domain name. You’d realize that some sites such as www.geocities.com/members/1234 do not have their own domain name. The tip here is to register your own domain name relevant to the company’s name, or industry for branding and image. If a website owner doesn’t even invest US$70 to get his own domain name, it seems he is not serious about his online venture and this would have a negative effect on his image.

You can get an International domain name, .com, .net, at lower price of registration, or a local Malaysian domain name, .com.my, .net.my, at RM100 per year. This investment would do wonders for the image of the website. For instance, www.gchsolutions.net is some great domain name.

You can register your very own domain & hosting at: Exabytes

Next, make sure that your website is registered in the international search engines (eg. Google), directories (eg. Yahoo!) and even the local ones. It is without doubt that much of the traffic to sites are still driven by these search engines and directories. You do not need to register your site with all the search engines out on the Internet. There are probably more than 7,000 so-claimed search engines! Just focus on the top 15 search engines and get your site listed there. You can either do the submission by yourself, or hire a consultant to do it. Either way, before proceeding, you need to read more about the search engine submission process, and their criteria. It’s not just about the metatags (as some so-called consultants will tell you), nor just the domain name. Various search engines and directories have different sets of criteria on what sites they would add on to their database and how do they rank a site. It makes a huge difference whether you’re No. 1001 or No.11 in the search results. If you’re listed at the very end of the search results, you should focus on optimizing your website ranking, to push it to a better position.

If you would like learn more about search engine optimization for your website, we, GCH IT team can consult with a minimum cost as low as RM50, we will coach you how to list your website in the Google search engine.

Example: if you search keyword "affiliate program" , "gml" , "income portal" from Google search engine page from malaysia, you are likely to see GCH listed within the first page. we will teach you how...

Your site should do everything possible to entice surfers leave their email addresses, join your membership or sign up for newsletter, for you to do email marketing. If your list is small, say 300 emails, you can even use your Outlook Express to send them Newsletters. However, when your membership grows, it might be easier to use professional service or email softwares. Email marketing is not just about sending them an email about your latest product, it’s about reaching to your members and giving them value-added information with irresistible offer! The successful formula of a newsletter is time-sensitive materials, reference information, special offers and fun. Email marketing’s effectiveness increases if the message is personalized to the reader, eg. “Dear Fione” in the content & subject rather than just general “Dear valued customer”.

Here is some great email marketing system that we highly recommended - Mailloop7 - automate it up to 85% of your email-related tasks and see a jump in sales 20%~45%.

If you are tiring up to use email marketing, here is the alternative way to Bypass e-mail and send your messages straight to your customer's desktop!

Another useful marketing tool is GML web system for Malaysian, When you use this, you are truly benefic for your business, as you will be getting target traffic to your website which 90% are from Malaysian, plus, you get 2 in 1 sms system software, Free 130 sms, advertise your biz on the net for life... To know more about GML system, you are welcome to join our weekly seminar - FREE - every Tuesday in our office at 8~9:30pm... contact: mail@gchsolutions.net for detail. thanks!

whole life advers, you must be very tactful in your promotions. Posting commercial messages without value to the other members is a total No-No! This is an ongoing process, and you can only see the results in the long run, so you’d need to be patient.

One misconception about increasing website traffic, is over reliance on online marketing, and not doing offline marketing. It’s amazing that people would actually spend money on their website, but not list the domain name on the name card, nor the company’s documents, eg. Letterheads, invoices, or store front. Sometimes, even the employees are not aware of the website! You must focus on where your prospects are. If they are offline now, offer them incentives to go online to your website as well. For instance, if you run a restaurant, your website should have discount vouchers for the members to print out, and redeem it at your outlet.

I often hear comments from small business owners that their websites don’t work. The truth is they don’t make their websites work. A website owner needs to take responsibility to promote his website just as much as promoting his physical business. Don’t just blame others. Increasing traffic to your website requires commitment and creativity.