Most web sites never see much traffic. It's a sad fact, but a fact none-the-less. Most new website owners create a shiny new website or blog with the intent of getting traffic, earning money, and at some point quitting their day job to work full time from home. Despite the fact there are millions of people surfing the web for what you are offering at a given time, there are websites that are more "relevant" than yours when it comes to whether or not yours is discovered. So what do we do here? Well it's all about making your website more relevant in the eyes of the Internet community.

There are many ways to make your website more relevant, we will call this marketing. Marketing must not be an afterthought of the web site. Say your website is selling your highly nutritional brand of dog bones, but all the website talks about is household pets and their general nutritional needs. Your content is not focused on a solution for those type of people who buy products like the one you are offering, thus never attracts the type of traffic you want to view your website (i.e. dog owners who want a better treat to give their dogs).

So how do we market your website in order to put those types of targeted eyeballs on it? Well there are expensive and inexpensive ways. We will stick to the inexpensive ways since if you had the money you would just hire a marketing company to market your website. Here are the nuts and bolts of web site marketing strategies:

1. Good market research. Market research is the absolutely most important thing you can do when marketing a website. This entails finding out what people are looking for relative to what you are offering. You must tweak the manner in which your marketing presents your product to in order to offer your prospective customers a "solution" to what they are looking for.

2. Your product should offer a "solution" to your customers' needs. Too many website owners market in a willy-nilly manner, not really taking a stand for what they are offering their visitors. If you don't believe in the product you are promoting, or you don't know exactly what you are offering your prospective customers, you better learn it and love it or get yourself a new product that you love, believe in, and know.

3. Target your message. Everything you put onto the web should be targeted toward your ideal website visitor. If you are selling dog bones your marketing should talk about the problem that other dog bones do not solve for your customer's dog, and why your bones are designed to help solve their problem, what your dog bone is going to do for their dog, and why the dog owner should ultimately buy your product ( pay for a solution to his/her problem). Marketing is too expensive and time consuming to be wishy-washy at the point of sale.

4. Under-promise and over-deliver. In this day of inflated prices and shoddy products, the key to producing a repeat customer and great word of mouth advertising (which ultimately equals more profits for you) is to give your customer more than they expect. How many times have you personally been burned by bad or apathetic customer service? In this "faceless" day and age it doesn't take much to build amazing rapport with your customers. You do not have to go the extra mile these days, but if you are not going the extra mile you are exposing yourself to someone who will, and then you are out a customer if not an entire market.

So we have done our market research, we have a product that solves a problem for that market, we have a message to that targeted audience, and we can deliver that product as promised or even better than promised, how to we begin to make sales?

It has become cliche to say that it takes 7 exposures to your product or company before a prospect becomes a customer, so we need to build a list of prospects before the sales will happen. This is not always true. If you want to make sales quickly, you can find someone who has already built a list of prospects related to what you are offering and someone whom might joint venture with you. Producing content around the market research you have done in order to gain targeted traffic via the search engines is very effective. You can also write ads using Google Adwords, that way you pay for only prospects interested in what you are offering. All of these are viable options to effectively market your website. I personally use these three options exclusively to build my business.

Building an online presence via web site marketing strategies is not hard once you have honed your research, product, message, and service. You need an effective means of capturing a prospect's contact information, building rapport, following up with them and ultimately delivering your product to them. When you put all these elements in place, then what you will need is room to expand your business as more and more sales roll in.