What do you hope to accomplish with your website? Some of us dream of changing the world, but most of us cherish some relatively modest goals. What you're trying to do with it determines the actions you'll need to take – or, to be specific, your website marketing strategy.
If you're planning to monetize your website in one way or another, there's four basic approaches. What you do to market your website will be very different depending on your approach. We'll look at each of these in turn.
First, you might simply be using your website to convey a certain image to your clients. What you're actually making money from, then, is the service you provide. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals may use this kind of site. You'll want to include contact information, some professional history about yourself, some details concerning the services you provide, and so forth.
You could, possibly, build a website like this yourself – but you probably shouldn't. Imagine this scenario: you're going to a meeting with a high-powered client, hoping to convince her to use your services. You need to wear a suit to the meeting. Would you sew that suit yourself? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't – and I've made money (briefly) as a seamstress!
If you're using your website to convey your professional image, you need to work with someone who is a website designer first and foremost, as opposed to a programmer. They also need to understand the kinds of marketing messages that particular design decisions may send to your site's visitors. For example, you wouldn't normally plan to use the same color scheme on a lawyer's website as you would on a bakery's website.
Taking site interactivity a step further, you might hope to use your website to generate new leads and customers for your business. Make that your goal, and your life instantly gets more complicated. It also may get more expensive.
If you only want to show a professional image to your clients with your website, you don't need to concern yourself as much with how they find your site. Presumably you'll give them a business card or other piece of literature, and they'll use that to look you up online for more information. If you're trying to attract leads with your site, on the other hand, your site needs to be able to do some of that work for you. It needs to rank in the search engines, and you need to get word of the site out to people who might become customers.
Website Marketing 
