For every service offered by any website on the internet, there are thousands of other sites that offer the same exact service. Yours is no exception. If you type in your keywords, you will discover businesses with similar offerings and may even find that some excel in areas yours doesn’t. Worse, you might not even find your website listed in the search results pages – at least not where it matters: at the top.
Your competitors don’t have a secret tool. Price, location of your business, opening hours etc. have secondary effects on how much business you are going to attract. Your competitors are taking away your clients primarily because they have put a marketing strategy in place that puts their sites where they can be seen by their clients. If your clients can’t find you, you can’t blame them for not doing business with you.
A business’ online presence doesn’t become a reality until an owner has put in place an aggressive marketing campaign. Word of mouth, link sharing and keyword placement alone won’t get you very far. You need marketing tools, with the capability of combining as many strategies as possible, if you are to have a fair chance at a great marketing plan.But where do you get these marketing tools? Well, there are software packages that are sold online that you can purchase in an effort to push your site through. Unless you are an expert at using promotion software, your success will be very limited, if at all.
So, what other options do you have? The marketing tools that have the best chance of increasing the visibility of your site are those that are offered by your web hosting provider. Here are three reasons why:
- Hosting providers are in the business of making money. One way of ensuring they get money from you is by making certain your site is successful. If your site dies, they lose you. Therefore, they offer you the best marketing tools they possibly can.
- For the same reason, they also make sure the tools are easy for you to use. If you can’t use them, they don’t do you much good, do they?
- Hosting providers, especially popular ones, have thousands of clients’ hosted on their servers. If the marketing tools they offer aren’t effective, you will hear about it. This keeps providers on the lookout for the best tool out there: When you win, they win.
Well, what are some of these tools and what do they do? A leading hosting provider that offers an impressive array of some the most useful marketing tools out there is iPage. Google is the dominant player in the search-engine game; with this in mind, iPage offers Google Apps for Work, a suite of tools, enabling its clients the capabilities of video conferencing, professional Gmail, time management via calendars, data storage and much more. With this “back office” supporting their business, clients can use another tool, My Marketing Services, in the fore for improving page ranking on top search engine result pages – critical in creating a strong online visibility.
Other hosting providers focus on creating a website that the visitors want to do business with. After all, no matter how much traffic is driven to a site it will have no effect in terms of conversions if it can’t hold their attention. IX Web Hosting focuses on selling its clients’ sites with the tools on offer. Among its arsenal are programs like Webalizer, Modlogan and Awstats. With these tools, website owners and administrators can tweak or tune their sites by studying the statistics and reports that are generated by them. If a page is not attracting as much traffic as is needed it can be analyzed to find out why it is performing poorly. The successful pages can shed light on what visitors like, which can then be implemented on other less-performing sites. Data can be gathered on where traffic originates from and this, in turn, can help with the implementation of language and country-specific features. The list goes on…
Apart from tools, there are hosting providers that offer hosting services which are entirely dedicated to marketing. In the case of Arvixe Web Hosting, the Email Marketing Web Hosting plan allows business owners to launch a campaign straight off the bat. Within minutes, a site owner can start contacting prospective clients across the globe via email, newsletters, announcements and promotions. With good content, a business can start reeling-in traffic within a matter of minutes.
Selecting the best web hosting provider for your site is a critical step in your website’s lifecycle. And an integral part of selecting a provider is making sure that, apart from offering your site a “comfortable” place to run from, you get as many tools at your disposal as is possible. Just like in the cases of iPage, IX Web Hosting and Arvixe, you should be able to get your hands on marketing tools that allow you to “push” your site out to your target audience.
Otherwise, you’ll simply have the best house in the middle of a forest – one for your own personal pleasure.
