Vague expectations

People usually have a vague idea when it comes to how an online presence will contribute to business revenue. Some figure the act alone of designing a website and putting it on the web is enough to start generating traffic. But that's not necessarily the case, especially in a competitive domain. The reality is, a website is like a store front business. If it's located downtown or in a shopping mall, people are more likely to visit. If it's located on some obscure side street, chances are nobody will even know the store exists.

Location, location, location...

People tend to forget that location is everything, even on the internet. The internet, however, obscures the notion of location. After all, the internet is a world wide network that allows anyone anywhere on the planet (not including those living under repressive regimes) to visit your website. This is what makes the WWW so exceptional, but also makes it difficult in terms of where one is located in this gigantic web.

So where are you located? Physically it does't really matter. You could live in Montreal, and your website could be hosted on a server physically located in southern California. Where does that leave you?

Your market

If you start a Dépanneur business in the Côte des Neiges area of Montreal, your market is determined by the ten minutes or so it would take your customers to walk to your store. In other words, your market is predetermined.  In the case of a website, there is no predetermined market, so you would have to determine it for yourself. How? By advertising. Yes, but what kind of advertising? Certain, paper-bound mentalities would suggest advertising your website in local newspapers, or by distributing tens of thousands of flyers to all the people who love receiving them. But there's something wrong with that. Distributing paper-based ads to promote a web-based business requires that people jump from one media to another. True, they'll read a flyer, jump into their cars and drive to a store, but they won't necessarily sit down in front of a computer and type in a web address. If you think I'm wrong, I know of a business that distributed 30K plus flyers and got 2 website visits and zero sales for the effort.

OK, forget flyers, what about television or radio? Well, both are expensive and neither target your audience. And you still have to jump from one media to another, which leaves you with:

The internet itself.

That's right. When do people go to a website? When they're already online visiting other websites.

It's all in the associations

If you want people - and not just any people, but the right people - to go to your website, then you have to create the right associations.

Creating those online associations (ie, locating your online business) inevitably leads us to SEO, which stands for search engine optimization.

Read the next article to learn more about this crucial subject.