We frequently hear companies complain after completing a big website upgrade project that their website is not delivering customers. We hear people say that “it isn’t living up to our expectations.” The problem is that people enter into website projects thinking that “if you build it and they will come.”

While that might work in the famous baseball movie “Field of Dreams,” it doesn’t apply when building a website.

Consider these facts:
In January 2007, there were 106,875,138 sites (1) on the internet. As of March 2009, there are 224,749,695 sites (1). This represents a 210% increase in 2 years.

How is your site going to stand out against all this growing competition?

So you have a website, now what?

A website is a marketing tool. It is similar to a postcard mailer, a television ad or a print ad. With the millions of websites out there, so how will people find yours? You need to think about how your website fits into your marketing efforts and then work to drive people to your site for the appropriate reason.

Here are some things that you can do to drive people and traffic to your website:

1. Does your product have a warranty or add-on features? Publish your website on your product literature and packaging as the place to go to register for these programs or to get more information about how to use your product.
2. Do you send customers invoices? Include your website on the invoices as a place to get information about your shipping terms and conditions or to re-order your product.
3. The product itself. Can you find a place to emboss or print your URL directly on your product?
4. Start an email marketing program to communicate with your customer and prospect list. Within the email message, include links to products or services which are featured on your website. 
5. Consider a pay-per-click advertising program. Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. offer advertising space within the search engine. You can position your text add to appear next to search phrases that match with words that your customers or prospects use to find your services. You can target these ads to appear globally, nationally, or only to a small geographic space.
6. Start a blog about your industry or service. Share your expertise and knowledge with like minded people. A blog is a web log or a very causal place to talk about a topic for which you have passion. Blogs are viewed favorably by the search engines. Some blogs have cult like followings and drive tremendous traffic to websites.
7. Social Media -- Is there a community online talking about your product or that has a problem your product can solve? Look at Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and find a community to join. You don't want to be self promotional, so join one and just "hang out" for a while to get a sense for what things people are saying. After a while, you'll be comfortable enought to join into the conversation. 

Remember, the work isn't done when your website is built or upgraded. Just as a baseball field needs maintenance after it's built, the same applies to your own "field of dreams." Make sure that you're keeping your website current, providing your visitors and customers with up-to-date content.

For more e-marketing tips, please go to www.cosemindspring.com to read more on my page.

(1) Netcraft LTD - http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html