Promoting your florist on the Internet
Marketing your florist on the World wide web may be one of the wisest things you’ve ever done. Right now there are thousands of potential customers on the web – and you don’t need to wait hoping that they stumble across you. There’s a lot you can do in order to make yourself easier to find when they’re looking on the web for a florist in your area.
You don’t need to have the most advanced company website for your florist – actually a straightforward but interesting website typically works better. You can simply employ a local web development company to develop a site (ask around locallyfor referrals). Many companies prefer to produce their own site, to make it easy to revise the information in future. It can be time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be difficult – there are lots of excellent solutions like Homestead and Wordpress.com that will help you to develop an attractive website easily.
Once you have built your website – make sure you have a good quality Analytics program set up. This will tell you how much traffic your site’s getting, and just how they’re finding you. Without this data you’re working in the dark. Google Analytics is a good system – it’s free of charge, and works perfectly.
One of the most important ways to promote your new site is to secure links from other website pages. General directories of sites, like Yahoo and Dmoz are a great place to obtain backlinks. Many are totally free (like Dmoz), others (for example Yahoo) you have to fork out for. Yahoo is a touch on the pricey side at $299 each year, but there are some other paid directories like JoeAnt that offer far better value for money.
florist websites that will list your details will almost always charge you money – but those that have high traffic numbers and can send lots of people to your site, it may well be money well spent. From time to time you discover a free site that specialises in your business – for example http://www.ClickFlorists.co.uk/ for the florist market.
Think about signing up with Google Adwords or one of the other Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising systems on the web. PPC can start sending you customers within minutes of setting up your account and publishing your first advert – there’s no faster method to start getting customers to visit your site. You only pay out when somebody actually visits – so it is a cost effective way to advertise on line. Just ensure you monitor your results with analytics software so you know whether your activities are worthwhile.
It’s superb getting visitors to your website – but one of the quickest ways to get visitors is to remind those people who visited before to come back and find out what’s changed. Email is the way to do this – and you’ll need to have customers’ email addresses and their consent to mail them when you’ve new stuff for them to have a look at. Make use of a service like Constant Contact to implement this. You can even automate the whole process by coming up with a series of emails ahead of time and arranging for them to be sent out at defined intervals – without you having to think about it again.
You’ve already taken the first step to gaining more potential customers from the Web – but the most fundamental step is yet to come – putting all this into action. Just work away at it, step by step – but do make a start. The earlier you start, the quicker you’ll have your first new customer from the Net.
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