If you have built your own website by employing usability designers, SEO staff and internet marketing consultants, you should be ready to push some traffic to the site to test if it’s converting. Typically, it takes a lot of staff, time and money to build sites that are optimized to rank high and drive traffic. There is a big difference between brochure websites that sit online for you to send customers to, so they can learn about your business and websites that generate new customers into the business.
Naturally, if you have put together great content you need to show it on pages within domains that have been optimized for search engines and are fed into social networking and book marking sites, where lots of participants are going to see the content.
If you don’t spend that extra time, money and effort to optimize a website, then your 5-10 thousand dollar website, if put online to attract new customers is a complete waste of money. You are much better off building out a social platform where you can post your content for free, on pages where people will see it, and invest your 5-10k into the content itself. In any case, you are going to need a sales funnel, an opt-in page, and a sales page where you can sell tickets and merchandise.
Sometimes I’ve had to face situations where people ask me to help with their website traffic – only to realize that their websites need so much work on their internal linking structure that they are better off throwing it away and starting again. I have had people come to me who were paying their web master to provide them Search Engine Optimization services ($50 per month) to rank for the phrase “Name of town Real Estate”. This person’s business was the only realtor in that town. The only people searching that phrase in the search engines where already looking for them. My advice to all my clients and businesses is that unless you are prepared to invest real money into a website to have it generate new business for you, don’t spend anything at all. Invest your budget into great content that you can place on web2.0 platforms.
Get yourself a WordPress blog for free and start blogging. Then decide on your sales funnel. It can be the blog or it can be a 3rd party web 2.0 platform that does everything for you and even provides payment processing. You don’t need a website if you can build web 2.0 content pages full of rich media around your events without cost. Event pages are built by stepping through a simple wizard to load content, design electronic invitations and set merchandising, ticketing and commissions.
So the basic funnel from the Search Engines to the Social Bookmarking Sites all the way into Social Networks is the same as explained in the previous section.
From there, you can channelize this traffic into your event pages where people can see all of your event specific content, find information about the event and buy tickets to it. In this way, the event page itself becomes the nucleus of all activity. It’s easier to drive search engine traffic to your event pages because the pages will be properly optimized, so all you need to do is apply strategies learnt in this book towards getting your pages in front of people who will bookmark them and link to them.
