If you are serious about promoting your garden centre on the Internet, then this article will offer you a quick summary of what’s involved. Net Marketing is a massive topic – a lot of books have already been written on the topic, and there are literally thousands of websites dedicated to it – it would be impossible to deal with everything in one article, but hopefully this brief summary will serve as a handy jumping-off point, that will get you started.

The first thing you need to advertise your garden centre on the net, is a great web site. Well in fact it is possible to market online without a website – but generally it is sensible to have one. Right now there are several different approaches to creating a website for your garden centre, depending on your finances and capabilities. You could create one yourself with an HTML editor, if you have the skills, or are prepared to learn. Everything you need to know is freely available on the web. That’s the most time-consuming method, but also the most affordable. If you prefer, you could always hire a web-design business to do everything for you. That won’t take nearly so long – but will cost more. In the middle, you could use a product like Weebly.com or Google Sites to produce a site – they make it simple and are either free, or very reasonably priced.

The next job is to deploy Google Analytics. This will show you how many users your website is receiving, where they’re coming from, and how much time they’re spending on your website. You could even use it to keep an eye on your advertising campaigns, and see what people are reading on your website. Very important!

Getting your site placed in a number of general directories can be a great place to get started with marketing. Almost everyone knows the Yahoo directory – but it’s pretty costly nowadays at $299, and does not actually send many visitors. Free directories like DMOZ, or less costly paid ones like JoeAnt or BestOfTheWeb are a better bet for most people.

If you can find websites that focus on garden centre then it’s always worth submitting your information to them – even those that charge for a page (as these vertical market directories usually do). It could very well be worth paying though – as they should probably perform better than the more general directories. One free garden centre site that’s certainly worth looking into is http://www.clickgardencentres.co.uk/. They demand in depth info on your garden centre but it is really worth the effort for the extra targeted visitors they’ll send .

A fantastic way to get targeted traffic to a new website is Pay Per Click Advertising (otherwise termed PPC). Pay per click lets you create an advertisement, and get it shown on other sites – yet you only have to pay when a person clicks it and arrives at your site. Google Adwords is the best known PPC system at the moment. It’s important to learn all about PPC before getting going – but it’s well worth learning more since it has the potential to deliver a lot of targetted website traffic to your garden centre site.

If you would like to be able to remind people to come back to your site – or to inform them when you have special offers on offer, then you’ll want to get their email address when they visit your website. Services like Constant Contact make this very easy. You can utilize the service to send out just one newsletter occasionally – or create a sequence to be sent on auto-pilot at intervals. This is a superb method of keeping in contact with prospective clients – and once it’s put in place – it all occurs automatically – you don’t have to worry about it again.

In a write-up this size, I’ve only been able to provide a brief overview of the key topics involved in advertising your garden centre online – there’s plenty that I’ve been forced to miss out. Luckily, all the info you need is out there on the net, and readily available – so you’ll easily be able to find more detailed information on any of the subjects mentioned above.