Tip 1: Do Your Market Research before Launching Your Free Website
Before you even register your free domain name you should do your market research. Online market research consists of two basic elements – general market research similar to what you would do for an offline business and keyword research to determine how your online visitors are going to find you on search engines, etc. Market research should tell you how many people are searching for topics related to your website, how much competition there is and whether people are actually paying for products in this niche – how profitable it will be.
Tip 2: Create a Professional Website
Whatever niche you are entering it is important to make sure that your business website looks professional. Nothing turns business away like a website that looks like it has been patched together at home.
Tip 3: Know What Your Customers Want
Part of creating a professional website is ensuring that you know what your customers want – what information are they looking for on your website? How do they want this information to be presented? What graphics and color schemes appeal to them the most? Create a free website that will appeal to your target market.
Tip 4: Don’t Neglect Search Engine Optimization
Although it is important to make a website that will appeal to your target market you also do not want to neglect search engine optimization. How will your visitors know they like your website if they can’t even find it to begin with? Following good SEO principles will help visitors find your site more easily and so bring you more business.
Tip 5: Capture People’s Email Addresses
One thing you have probably seen on other people’s websites is a page where they encourage you to give them your email address – perhaps by giving away something for free. This is important because you don’t want people to forget about your site once they have visited once. You want to keep reminding them until they actually purchase something from you and that means that you need to get permission to keep in contact with them by having a subscription form somewhere on your site.
Tip 6: Promote Your Website Effectively
Once your site is up you need to ensure that people visit it. If you just leave this to chance then it is not very likely to happen and you may be tempted to think online marketing is a waste of time but put some effort into your marketing efforts and you will reap the benefits. Learn about search engine optimization, social media marketing, PPC advertising, article marketing and a variety of other marketing methods (mostly free) that you can do to get your site seen. Promote regularly and consistently for best results.
Tip 7: Test and Track Results
Testing and tracking is essential to your website’s success. Test and track how different advertising works – where most of your website traffic is coming from, test different pages of your website and how changes to these pages affect the results you get from them. There are many different ways you can do this but one of the best (and its free) is Google Analytics. This allows you to see how many people are visiting your website, where they are from, what page referred them, and much more. By analyzing these stats you will be able to see what is working and what is not on your website and make changes accordingly until you optimize your results.
Take time to start your free website effectively – do your research, create a professional website and market it consistently. Then test and track the results you are getting to see where you can improve and achieve optimum results from your website.
