So lets imagine that your website has been built and you are ready to go out into the big wide world and start promoting it like crazy. But wait! Before you spend a single cent on website promotion, you need to set some goals first. As discussed in Planning Your Website, you first need to figure out just how popular you want your website to be.

Consider this: If you are, let's say hypothetically, a legal consultant, how many consultancy cases can you handle in a day? Perhaps two or three at a stretch? If that is the case, what happens if your website promotion really pays off and your website starts getting a huge amount of traffic and all of a sudden you have ten jobs in a day?  Is this a good or a bad thing? Will you have to turn people away?

For most companies, too much work is just as dangerous as too little and can greatly compromise the level of service and quality that they can provide to their customers.

On the other end of the scale, if your business relies on getting as many sales as possible, what happens if your website promotion efforts simply don't measure up? What happens to all the stock that you purchased in anticipation of a huge flurry of sales that just didn't come? Without the proper planning and reasonable expectations of success, you are asking for trouble.

It is imperative that you set some goals for your website promotion success before embarking on any kind of marketing campaign.

A few simple questions you can begin to ask yourself that will help you in your marketing planning are:

1. How much interest and business can you and your company deal with?
2. How much of that business do you want to originate from your website?
3. How many visitors to my site do I need in order to feasibly convert into business?
4. How much budget can you comfortably allocate towards website promotion and will this be enough to achieve your goals? (For more information on this, see What Is Your Budget?)

Bear in mind that website promotion can be an extremely complex and complicated process and we would recommend that you employ a company that specialises in website promotion to make the most of your budget and to help you achieve your goals. The company you choose will definitely be able to give you sound advice as to how to proceed with your website promotion campaign.

Having said this, it never hurts to be as knowleadgable about website promotion as possible, so lets go through a few terms and definitions about a subject called Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as this is fast becoming the most powerful method of website promotion today...

Click Next to move onto the next lesson - SEM - What You Need To Know