Yay– you have a brand new website! You’ve built (or paid someone to build for you) a great new design that really shows off your identity, spent countless hours creating your new home page, an “about us” page, maybe even uploaded a photo album or two.  You may even have a fantastic contact form that anyone can fill out and start communicating with you within minutes.  Congratulations– you are on the web!  And guess what?  No one cares.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s look at the numbers:  In December of 2008, Netcraft– the people responsible for calculating the size of the web– reported that there were 186,727,854 sites on the Internet.  In January of 2009, the same group reported that there were 185,497,213 sites– a loss of 1.23 million sites.  Now here’s the question:  do you remember all of the news coverage on CNN, FOX News, and the other outlets about the Great Website Disaster of 2009, when nearly 1,230,000 websites just vanished from the Internet?  Do you remember typing in your favorite web destination, only to discover it was gone without an explanation?

Of course not, because there was no Great Website Disaster of 2009.  Want to know why?  Because no one noticed.  No one was going to those 1.23 million websites.  Oh, sure, they had a domain name, some content, maybe some photos and an awesome design.  They built it, but no one came.

If you think about this in terms of running a business, it makes perfect sense.  Imagine, for a moment, that you are opening a coffee shop.  Its going to be the coffee shop of coffee shops.  So you set out on your new venture.  You start brainstorming ideas of how you are going to be different than the competition, selecting just the right name, finding the perfect location, hiring a designer to make the most brilliant use of color, lighting, and texture the coffee world has ever seen.  By the time you are ready to open, you’ve spent months researching and refining your product selection.  Once everything is perfect, and you’ve hired your staff, trained and drilled them, polished the silver until you can see your own reflection, called the phone company and hooked up phone service, made sure they put your shop’s name and new number in the phone book… you are ready.

You congratulate yourself, as you’ve thought of absolutely everything…  even on the first day the coffee is brewing, the cakes are baking, the cheesecakes are chilling, and you are ready to greet the flood of new customers, dying to try your wares.  So there you sit behind the counter, happily waiting for your first customer… and nothing happens.

No one comes.

Why?   You have the perfect name, location, product, even a phone number and an entry in the latest copy of the phone book.  What went wrong?  For anyone who has ever successfully started their own business, the answer is obvious:  you didn’t advertise, you didn’t put a big flashing sign out, you didn’t go out on the street and hand out samples to those passing by, you didn’t enlist your friends and family to spread the news about your new shop, you didn’t talk about your new place to anyone and everyone who would listen… in short, you simply didn’t get the word out.  As anyone who has lived through this will tell you, a business without advertising is simply a location waiting for its next tenant.

And yet some of these same people who would never think to invest in a new business and not promote it in every way, shape, and form imaginable will register a domain name, create their new site, and then sit back and expect the masses to come simply because they built it… and then months or years later scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong.

Over the next couple of posts, we are going to look at what you can do to get the word out about your new website.  How to build traffic, excite your visitors, and, most importantly, keep them coming back time and time again:

1. Website Traffic 101:  If I Build It, Will They Come?
2. Website Traffic 101:  Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail
3. Website Traffic 101:  Google is Neither the Question Nor the Answer
4. Website Traffic 101:  I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream!