Why Online Marketing is hard

Often when I'm conducting my online marketing training, the students express dismay over the amount of work required to be found online.

The reality is, the days of creating a website and automatically getting visitors is over folks. You can decide to NOT look at your web traffic reports, and assume that your website is helping you get visitors/volunteers, or you can create a plan with daily online marketing tasks to help build traffic to your website.

Why is it hard?

• There are 11.5 billion web pages indexed on the Internet
• There are over 200 factors that help to determine how a website ranks in each of the various search engines.

But before you get overwhelmed...here's the good news:

1. The fact that Volunteer Centers are non-profits, housed in universities or government agencies, and the fact that we work with those folks (and can get links to them) works in our favor.
2. Local search is not get being utilized by non-profits and you can shine (and outrank) other folks in your area by registering for free.
3. There are TONS of people already searching for volunteer opportunities in places like Craigslist, and by joining others on Meetup.com. Both are free to join and post - you should do both.
4. If you encourage your volunteers, link building to your website can become natural as they talk about their positive experience on their MySpace pages and Facebook profiles. You just need to make sure that their experience is positive, and encourage them to post in those areas. Or you can join Facebook yourself, and create a volunteering group for your nonprofit.
5. You can see the ideas for promoting your volunteer opportunities and website online are endless and there are hundreds of free ideas you can try before you need to spend anything on online advertising.

Before you get discouraged, just decide to do 1 online marketing task every day. Start by createing a plan, and then take the steps necessary to make sure your site is helping you find volunteers for your community. Sometimes little steps make a huge difference.