I recently received an email from Scott of Ironside Storage Solutions looking for advice on how to promote his website.  Scott’s website sells his invention, called the “Holey Rail”. Scott’s website is www.ssironsides.com

Scott, promoting your site is not hard, but it takes work. I looked at your site www.ssironsides.com and here’s my opinion on what you need to do. It needs some work, and here’s what you need to do.

1. Register a new domain. 

Get a new domain name and work on branding your rails. I looked, and www.holeyrail.com is availible. THIS this what you need to be promoting. You need to be promoting the “Holey Rail”, not Ironside Storage Solutions. You want it so when peope search for “holey rail” on Google, your website comes up. People are not going to remember “Ironside Storage Solutions”. It’s too long and pretty hard to remember, and the domain name www.ssironsides.com is really not good. It needs to be as simple and as easy to remember as possible. Even something like www.railman.com would work. Think about it and see what you can get.

2. Work on SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. How it works is the search engines send out “spiders” that crawl websites. They gather the information and bring it back to the search engines to index. This information can be found by people who searched for words that the spiders picked off your site. The more text you have on your site, the more info the engines can index and can be found by people on the internet. Your website has almost none. There’s very little for the spiders to pick up, which means there’s very little for people on the internet to find. There’s also keywords you can work on, but that’s a whole other post. I’m trying to keep this one simple.

3. Get a redesign.

Get your site redesigned if you can afford it. In all honestly, your site looks like someone with poor web design skills tried to outdo themself. It looks unprofessional. People only buy off the internet if they trust you. Having a professional website builds trust. Your layout is OK, but you have several different font sizes and font styles all clashing with each other. It looks terrible and unprofessional. Some images are squeezed, some are stretched. It’s all over the place. This is all bad if you want sales.

4. Add a blog.

Adding a blog can bring more traffic, which can convert to possible sales. Blogs are SEO friendly and easy to promote. With your blog you can write articles about topics that your target market would be interested in. I’m guessing it would be middle age home owners mostly being male. You can write about topics such a landscaping and home remodeling. The more your write, the more traffic you will receive, and that means more potential for sales.

GOOD LUCK!