No way, you are saying, right? How in the world am I going to have a grand opening with my store not even finished yet!
Rule Number One – Make Sure Your Site is Finished
It’s interesting how our thinking works sometimes. While no one would never even think about having a grand opening day for their physical store while it’s still under construction, or even while the store is not completely ready; many people are
expecting to see traffic to their site, while the site is not ready yet or with very little content available.
The golden rule for a website is pretty much the same as a physical store, because your website IS your online store. Therefore, you need to treat it as such.
Do not start your grand opening day (your site promotion) if your site is not complete or still pretty much empty. You will give a bad impression to your visitors and they may never come again. You know the saying “you’ve got only one chance to make a first impression”. This is true for your website as well.
While you might be in a hurry to bring in some traffic to your website to start making money, you need to go through the work process of completing it first. This doesn’t mean that you cannot update and make it better over time, but first thing first, make sure it’s 100% presentable before you start promoting it.
Give Life to Your Website With Regular Fresh Content
If you have just built your website, that’s great, but there are two important things you need to make sure that your website includes.
1. A Blog
The public as well as Google like regular fresh content and the best known platform for regular fresh content is a blog.
If your site is a blog, you don’t have to worry, just make sure that you create a nice article post at least once a week and you will bring in visitors and Google crawlers to your site fairly quickly. If your site is a website, however, you need to create a blog and add that blog to your site, so your website will show fresh new content on a regular basis.
There is no doubt that this will create extra work for you, but it’s part of the business. Just like most retail stores have extra services to please and attract more customers, your blog will be part of your customer service, helping you to attract more visitors and please Google at the same time due to the regular new content flow which Google loves.
2. Service your visitors (potential customers)
There are many different ways that you can use to be of good service to your visitors who are also your potential customers.
If you have ever been at the grand opening day of a physical store, you have noticed that sales associates, managers or even the store owner has approached you asking you if you needed any help. Of course, their ultimate goal is to sell you something, they are hoping to make a customer out of you, but their first approach is still to try to help you by answering your questions or finding what you are looking for.
You need to do the same thing with your website. Here are 3 simple ways that will help you service your online visitors well and encourage them to come back to you site (store).
• A very good way to help your visitors would be to make sure they understand what your site is all about by creating a well written and detailed “about” page. I have sometimes landed on sites where I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about their services. In such case, I go to the “about” page to make sure that the site is what I am looking for. A clear, detailed and yet easy to read “about” page is a must for your new visitors.
• Create a FAQs page where you can gather all the questions and answers you ever have ran into regarding your niche. If you don’t have any FAQ on the top of your head, you can always browse forums of your niche and see what type of questions people are asking on a regular basis. Create a page or two with basic and frequent questions and answers about your niche or product.
• Write articles that answer basic questions or give tips, and link those articles to your site. Try to create a pool of articles that would help your visitors by giving them insight about your niche and link your site to your article pool. It could be an article directory or even a PDF. It’s up to you and what you want to accomplish with such tool.
Getting ready for your grand opening
Now that you have made sure that your website is 100% completed with added fresh content and a good customer service in place, you are ready for your grand opening.
Now, it’s time to gather about a dozen article directories, all your social media logins, join forums, comment on other blogs of the same niche as yours, and all the promotion avenues you can think of to bring some new visitors to you brand new site.
While doing this you can make all the necessary final needed touch-ups to your website and keep updating your blog regularly with new fresh content.
If you follow all the above instructions you will be ready to start bringing in many visitors to your new website, while ensuring that many of them will actually come back and become your regular customers