Marketing the website

I received my first mail today via the online web form. My heart skipped a beat when I saw an unread mail in my inbox which I was sure was not sent by myself.

I opened the mail with trepidation, my mind racing with thoughts of what it could contain and whether I was really going to get my first customer this soon. 

Alas!! While it was a filled up form, the information provided were all gibberish. Either it was a some program which did an auto-submission or it was some person deciding to play a cruel prank on me. Well at least someone was reading my site. 

GoDaddy provides a free web statistics program that informs me how many times my website was requested. I misinterpreted this as how many site visitors and was actually pretty happy to see that the figures averaged about 50 a day. Unfortunately the stats only revealed how many times my site had been called up in a search but not necessarily viewed. 

It was time to put more effort into marketing my site. 

Another trip to the library to borrow Web Marketing for Dummies by Jan Zimmerman. This book  focuses on companies that already  have an established offline presence and is using the internet to expand their business. Nonetheless it did direct me towards a few improvements.

First to develop a more professional site. I decided to put aside ego and went online to look for a free website template from FreeWebTemplates which I made minor modifications to using my basic knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Second to introduce my own company logo. Bring Me There’s focus is helping people plan their trips so a compass made sense as my primary logo. I created one free of charge on LogoEase.

Third to establish goals for the site in terms of traffic and conversion into dollars and cents or other effective KPIs. Assuming I was looking at establishing 1 new email contact daily with a decent conversion rate of 1%, it means having to achieve a traffic of 100 views a day.