Marketing your Site

Despite all the hard work in creating your site, you should not be fooled into believing that "if you build it, they will come". There are many wonderful sites on the Internet that cannot be found because of poor search engine visiblity and limited marketing efforts. Fortunately, today's Internet offers a plethora of options to choose from when marketing your site. For dog breeders, one of the best options for advertising is to use a site like BulldogBreeds.com's Breeders Directory. Our directory has both a free and premium membership and receives over 100,000 unique visitors a month. Other sites offer similar listings, but be sure to check their traffic before spending any money. If you were to try to generate that sort of traffic on your own, it could cost you as much as $5,000 per year. Besides directories, here are some other means of advertising your site:

• Submit your site to search engines
• Join a Web Ring, so that your site will be connected to other similar sites
• Link exchanges
• Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising
• Start an Affiliate Marketing Program (probably not for beginners)
• Create a Banner Ad Campaign (can be expensive)

Though each of these has some value, we will talk a litte more in-depth about the ones that we have found to be useful in marketing this site.

Link Exchanges
The search engines of today rely on links to rank your site more than any other factor. Consequently, we recommend this as the number one step before all else, if you want to tap into free search engine traffic. A site with a solid number of links doesn't even need to be submitted to the search engines as the search engines will automatically find it while "crawling" the 'Net. So, find some sites similar to yours and see if they will link to your site, if you link to their site.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Notice above, we recommend link exchanges "if you want to tap into free search engine traffic". That's a big "if", because it's not always a good idea to attempt to get good search engine rankings -- especially if your site is very small. Search engine rankings are very competitive -- everyone wants to be on the first page of results for their keywords. Because of this, it is often simply not worth the effort to spend massive amounts of time trading links and promoting your site to the search engines if you have a small site. Instead, we recommend using Pay Per Click advertising to send targeted traffic to your site. For just 5 cents per visitor, you can send traffic to your site from Google, the largest search engine. The important thing is that you analyze how many visitors it takes to make a sale, so that you can decide if it's worth the money. For example, using the Google AdWords program, you can specify that you want your ad to appear on the search results page when someone enters the phrase "english bulldog breeders" into the Google search engine. After a week, you notice that 500 clicks on your ad resulted in the sale of 1 puppy. Since you paid 5 cents per click thats 500 clicks * 5 cents, which equals $25. Those figures are imaginary, so you'll have to check for yourself to see what sort of results you actually receive. Nevertheless, many small businesses (including BulldogBreeds.com) use this form of advertising. For more information, use the link below:

Google AdWords

Producing Content

Though not listed above as a means of marketing your site, we feel it is important to include this because content often draws people to your site, keeps them their longer, and increases the chance of them returning to your site. Even a little content can go a long way in making a happy visitor. What sort of content could you possibly have? If you are a dog breeder, we recommend putting as many photos of your dogs on the site as possible because people love photos. It would also be helpful to put a history of the dog breed that your are breeding. Both of these will increase the chance that a visitor will bookmark your site. And, of course, if that visitor decides to purchase a puppy of that wonderful breed he or she was reading about, then your site will be the first place he or she goes.

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