After countless hours, days, even months, your website is up and completed and ready to go live, but before you can start raking in sales, you'll first have to accomplish the feat of building brand awareness with your target audience. So what is brand awareness, and how can you build it?
Creating brand awareness is the idea of your target audience recognizing your name/business/product/service. For instance, if you own a business called 'Wonderful World of Widgets', then you would want people to think of you when they think of widgets. This will undoubtedly increase your sales because your target market will know where to go to purchase their widgets. Let's go a little further into this. When you think of books online, Amazon.com probably comes to mind. This is because Amazon.com has effectively built their brand awareness. Now when you want to buy a book online, you may or may not make your purchase with Amazon, but you'll probably end up looking for your book on their site at one time or another. Brand awareness is a very powerful marketing tool.
On average, an Internet user will need to see something about seven or eight times before they actually respond to it. This means that the first through sixth time they see your site, it's building up your brand awareness. With that said, building your brand is quite simple. All you need to do is to get your website in front of your target audience as much as possible. I know this idea might sound like a huge marketing operation that will drain your pockets into infinite depths, but it's really not.
A great place to start is with guaranteed traffic. It is very cost effective and it's a very simple way of getting your site in front of people. You could also ask people to review your site in forums. Most likely the link will stay in the thread forever, so the possibility of getting new people to look at your site over time is pretty good.
Building
brand awareness doesn't take a massive marketing budget, and can
even be accomplished using a bit of creativity. Just remember, the
more
you can get your site in front of people, the better off you will
be in the long run.