One of my client to whom we provide web development services recently showed me concerns about his website not driving enough traffic as per their team’s expectations a few months back. I asked him what were their expectations when they launched or even planned the venture and the answer did not surprise me. Many new website owners make a fundamental mistake thinking that as soon as you have a website that new customers and visitors will be rolling in. This simply is not true. A website is no different from a new store or office in the real world, only that it resides in a cyberspace. Without an effective internet marketing service to reach out to the new cyberspace customers, no one will know that your business exists!

My client expressed his feelings that even word of mouth has not helped them that much. They expected that once a few visitors start visiting their site, they will help promote the site by the means of word of mouth practicing. True. We read about cases of such fortunate sites raking in a load of traffic just by word of mouth, but while we still continue to get amazed by these successes, but prefer to overlook the kind of traffic booster they had. They have Harvard and Stanford campuses to back them up with word of mouth; they had free traffic to attract mass audience.

Unfortunately, we don’t! So, unless you are also backed up by such kind of traffic goldmine, we can’t just go on expecting that people will find the site and it’s attractiveness on it’s own, simply by building a world-class website. We will have to go the extra mile to attract the initial user base.

I have seen entrepreneurs who invest $50,000 building a world-class application but hesitate to even pour in 10% equivalent of that technology investment for their marketing needs. It is no surprise that these are the guys who keep wondering why their site is not having any real traffic even after 1 year of their launch. Having a world-class product is not enough in today’s world. Everywhere, whatever you do, we have competition. Your product, no matter how innovative, is not the only one in the market and hence it won’t sell on it’s own. It is a shame that even today most of the tech entrepreneurs give no importance to internet marketing or traditional marketing channels. All they know is how to get a high-class product built and do the wait-and-watch business. They forget that fact that this was the very mistake techies did in the beginning of 21st century which caused the dot-com bubble of 2001-02.

Kunal Pandya

Kunal is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and startup evangelist. He has helped build and scale up several businesses and products from the ground up. Apart from NCrypted, he serves as an advisory and is on the board of several of our client companies that we partner with.