Setting up a website offers a great way to showcase your products and services to potential customers. However, simply having a site isn’t enough; you also need to get it to work for you if you want to grow your sales. And with over 12 billion web pages in cyberspace there’s plenty of competition for visitors and business.

Internet marketing is all about attracting traffic to your site and then converting that traffic once it has reached you.

The two most effective ways to attract visitors are pay per click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO).

With PPC, companies bid for the terms that they think their target customers will be using when they search the internet. This means that they are able to attract people who are actively looking for their products and services and who are therefore effectively qualified leads.

The highest bidder receives the highest ranking in the search engines’ sponsored listings. Plus, because you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad you can ensure that what you spend is directly related to the business you generate.

SEO is slightly different. It involves making copy and coding changes to your site and establishing links with other websites in order to gain high ranking in the search engines’ natural listings for a particular search term.

As around 90% of search engine users click on the natural rather than sponsored listings, SEO helps companies to attract a higher volume of targeted traffic than PPC. However, both of these marketing methods are incredibly successful when done properly owing to the fact that the majority of internet users rely on search engines to find websites.

Generating sales from your website is also a critically important aspect of any good internet marketing campaign. Ensuring that your website is user friendly, has clear calls to action and is fast loading are all factors that contribute to how likely you are to close a sale.

There are a number of services on offer to help you market your website from SEO and PPC management to training courses and website reviews.

Although each of these services has merits, if you are operating on a small budget, you are likely to get the best value for money from a website review. They tend to be a lot cheaper than other internet marketing services and if you apply the advice from them the rewards can be much further reaching.

A good website review will tell what changes you need to make to your site to grow your traffic and sales. It should also include a follow up consultation to explain the recommendations in the report and give you advice about how to implement them.

Ultimately, whatever route you decide to follow bear in mind that you need to focus on both increasing both traffic and sales in order to stand out from the crowd and get the business you deserve.