Maybe you have a beautiful new website and are wondering how to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. Or perhaps business is slow, and you need the sales that an optimized website can generate. Regardless of your specific situation, if you are interested in promoting your website like a pro, we asked industry experts who have been in the trenches just like you and here is their marketing advice.
Joe Goldstein
SEO
For many websites, SEO is the best long-term option. Search engine optimization lets you leverage almost all of your other marketing efforts, connections, and accomplishments to reach people who are actively searching for your products and services.
The most important things with SEO are to have patience, keep at it, understand the customer journey, and to pick the right keywords. Many businesses trying SEO for the first time think that they need to rank for huge, competitive keywords in multiple markets, but starting with smaller, more targeted keywords can earn you conversions quicker, and typically at a fraction of the price.
Forums
For me, the best way to market a website has always been to embed myself in the community that the website will serve. Find their forums, find them on Twitter and in Facebook groups. Interact, build your audience from those groups, and they will start to pay your site a visit. Word of mouth is a powerful tool, and showing communities that you are an expert without trying to immediately sell to them will help in the long run.
Simon Ponder
SEO Outreach Manager at Image Freedom.
Zach Pittman
Know Your Brand
An entire book could be written on the topic of “what to do to market my website.” Everything begins once you know your brand. Your brand stands for why you do what you do. Once you know your brand, you know who to target and what type of posts or ads to use to promote your website. Currently, the best way to promote anything is by running Facebook and Instagram advertisements. These methods allow you to promote your website to specific people based on a wide array of demographics.
Behind ads, posting valuable content on your social media accounts is the next critical step. By running ads and posting valuable content, anyone’s website can grow and flourish. Remaining consistent in these methods as well as adding new accounts on different platforms, allows your brand to become omnipresent. Once you’ve reached this level of marketing supremacy, you still only need to stick to the basics of knowing your brand, running ads, and posting valuable content. Rinse and repeat.
Become an active participant
The best way I have found to market my website online is to find where my target market hangs out and whether it’s forums or social media communities (all niches seem to have their corner of the internet). Once you have identified where the community hangs out online, become an active participant in the community and create helpful content and add value.
Louis Wood
Hilary Jones
Basic tactics
I market my photography website in a couple of ways, but it all comes down to SEO or through our business cards.
To promote through SEO, we use basic tactics like putting title tags and meta descriptions on every page. We also make sure our website is linked throughout our social media like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest and that we have online listings like Google and Wedding Wire. Another way is through back-linking, getting published on a wedding blog, other wedding vendor blogs that we photographed or even local bloggers in the area. And the third major way we work on our local SEO is to ask for reviews from our clients through Google, Facebook and Wedding Wire.
Our website is also a part of all of our print material for traditional marketing, our business cards, pricing print offs and more.
Social Media
A more unique way to market your website is by joining relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Find groups closely related to your industry, customers or target market. Then, strike up and join in conversations and be genuinely helpful in your responses. While you don’t want to spam the group, share relevant pages or content from your website when it makes sense to do so in a way that provides value. I’ve had clients find me, and other copywriters recommend me, as a result of my being moderately active in Facebook groups in particular.
Kim Hobson
Nate Masterson
Nate Masterson is CMO of Maple Holistics, a company dedicated to cruelty-free, natural, and sustainable personal care products.
Referral marketing
One really great tool, especially if your customers think that you’re the best in your field, is referral marketing. Referral marketing can display in various ways. You can award cash prizes, important discounts, or even product giveaways. The solution is that a referral should be rewarded. With incentives, you will get more referrals than you will without them.
Focus on themes
First, hone in on one or two main themes that are effectively communicated via your website. This could be your profession, a hobby or some other passion of yours, a product you love, etc. Then spend time digging to find out who the micro- and macro-influencers are, locally, nationally and globally. Finally, pitch your themes to them via social media networks, following them and tweeting about what they do and what they like and how that all ties into your interests and passions by way of the themes communicated on your website. Focus on the themes, and let the website be the medium of communication – not the purpose for communicating.
The important thing is that your website is coherent and the themes you are pitching are easily discernible. If you love dogs and are trying to get people to visit your website to learn more about dogs – but you have a landing page without dogs, visuals that are too busy and do not make clear to a visitor within 2.5 seconds, ‘This website is about dogs, for people who love dogs!’, you likely will not have much luck attracting a target audience.
Andreà Cassar
Keri Lindenmuth
Press Releases
There are a variety of ways you can market your own website:
- Press Releases: Press releases aren’t only a great way to announce that your company has a new website, but they’re also a great way to build links back to your website. Press releases don’t always have to be “breaking news” -worthy. Submit press releases about your products or services to different distribution sites, like EINPresswire or PRLog, to build awareness in regards to your brand.
- Social Media Posts: Having your own social media profiles is another way to market your site. Post links back to your website. Look for ad opportunities. Facebook or LinkedIn ads give you the chance to promote your business and site to larger audiences.
- Guest Blogs and Backlinks: Look for opportunities to spread links to your site. This could be through guest blog posts for other businesses in your industry, or through quotes to online media outlets.
- Email Blasts: It’s hard to build an email list without a website; however, if you have some customers and contacts, send them an email announcing your new website. This will help spread the word.
Use Quora
Instead of thinking of ways to market your website, think of solutions to pre-existing questions. If you have a service you want to offer, you should be thinking of how you can present it as a solution to problems that people are searching for online. Write blog posts and search on Quora to find places to copy and paste your blog posts that already answer questions.
Matt Holmes
Christian Lovrecich
Paid advertising
If you don’t have a budget the best way to promote your website will be by creating an Instagram account since it still has massive organic reach. Post content on there using 8 relevant hashtags about 5 times a day with a call to action that will get you traffic to your site. Make sure on the site you have an email capture option where you can offer visitors something in exchange for their email address.
The money is in the lists.
Once you start building your email list, you can constantly send them offers to buy your product and it’ll start to generate revenue for you.
Once you have a list big enough and are creating enough revenue for yourself you can start looking into running paid advertising. I would recommend starting with Facebook, which is one of the most powerful platforms out there with the most data and ROI based on ad-spend.
You can also create a daily blog that links back to your site, YouTube channel, a podcast…. The outlets are endless…
The name of the game is to create as much content as possible related to your niche with a call to action back to your site. As long as you keep doing this steadily, you will see a significant increase in organic traffic back to your site along with sales.
It won’t happen overnight but the more content that you put out there, the easier it is for people to find you.
Google Search Console (GSC)
Sign up for Google Search Console (GSC) and a Google My Business (GMB) page as well as Bing’s versions. GSC will help you understand what terms you rank for as well as allow you to submit your sitemap to search. This helps decrease the time it takes for your site to be indexed by Google. GMB will help you show up better for local and branded searches. Make sure you add a description of your business as well. If you are a home-based business, you can verify the GMB as service bases, allowing your home address to remain hidden, and set your target service area. (We get that question all the time.)
Jason Eland
Gregory Golinski
Gregory Golinski, Head of Digital Marketing of YourParkingSpace.co.uk
Facebook group
A great way to promote your own website is to create a Facebook group.
Business owners tend to focus their energy on Facebook pages, but Facebook’s latest algorithm has limited the reach of posts on these pages. A Facebook group is much better to communicate with your audience and convert new customers, because posts in Facebook groups reach many more people.
Never spam your Facebook group. Create a lively community where members feel like publishing content, chatting and interacting with each other. Share content from your website once in a while so that people visit your website, but only if it brings something interesting to the conversation.
Facebook groups are a great way to introduce people to your brand and bring traffic to your website.
Branding
Marketing a website is more formulaic than most people give credit for. A steady ad budget in (our personal favorite) Facebook Ads, great content, strong branding, and an intuitive navigation will get you far. Another great strategy to employ is making sure your website is advertised at every opportunity. Is it on your handouts? Trade show booth banners? Business cards? And more.
Emily Rowe
Lisa Hirst Carnes
Content marketing
If your business is new, it’s critical that you establish some good channels that will drive traffic to your website while you’re getting established. Think about where your core audience is and what sources they trust.
We typically recommend that organizations run some sort of paid advertising like Google or Facebook Ads for a quick shot in the arm. While you’re running a paid campaign, start laying your content marketing foundation by implementing a blog or content hub on your site.
The content you create should target keywords your audience uses to search for your product or service. Content marketing will increase your organic traffic so eventually, you won’t have to pay for your leads.
Use Premium Tools
1. Make use of the endless number of free, freemium and premium tools out there! There are a wide array of tools such as SEMrush, BrightLocal, Screaming Frog and many more which will help you analyse and improve the performance of your website. Whether it is improving the UX of your website so it looks more favourable in the ‘eyes’ of RankBrain, or improving the speed of your website, there is a tool for the job!
2. Ensure you are as active as possible on your blog by creating well-written and personal content. When I say personal content, I mean content that looks and reads like it has been written by a human being, not a robot. You want to add a bit of humour in there and maybe add some personal anecdotes about your own experiences in the topic you are writing about. This will bring more traffic to your website ahead of your competition.
3. Get backlinks. And I cannot stress this one enough. Ensure you add your website to high authority directories, other blogs, news websites and anywhere else you can. Not only does this make sure that Google sees your website as more authoritative in your industry, but it also ensures there is a constant stream of traffic coming to your website.
Ryan Jones
Jorge Sheffy
Jorge Sheffy has been in the web design industry for over 20 years as a freelancer. More recently he’s built a business on simplifying the process of getting a website for small local businesses with an affordable model of transparent pricing and straightforward design process.
Google Ads
I market my own website through Google Ads and Facebook ads. These are two methods I’ve found that can effectively bring new and targeted visitors to my website. I use them both in different ways.
With Google Ads, I target people searching specifically for what I do (website design) with highly targeted keywords and landing pages that are relevant to those keywords.
For Facebook ads, I write niche content that is relevant to a specific industry and then I advertise to those in that industry. For example, I recently wrote a blog post about 10 top plumbing websites and then I promoted it to plumbers.
These are great ways to market a website, and I’ve found them to be effective ways to get targeted visitors.
Answering questions
The best way to market your own website is to create high quality content and post it to the blog section of your website. Answer specific questions that people ask you regularly about your business and you will begin to see Google reward you for it. Content marketing is the biggest factor when it comes to online visibility. Once you generate this content, share it on your social media profiles and allow your audience to benefit from what you have written.
Bryan Pattman
Nicolas Straut
Nicolas is an SEO Associate at Fundera, a marketplace for small business financial solutions, who specializes in search engine optimization and organic growth marketing.
Target Keywords
When marketing your website, I would recommend creating interesting content that is optimized for search engines to draw viewers organically. The best part about creating content as a marketing tactic is that it will continue to draw visitors to your website on a consistent basis as long as the content is updated and optimized, unlike paid advertising which will cease drawing visitors once campaigns are done.
To get started, consider what keywords you would like your website to rank for. For example, if you have a website which sells water bottles, you could target a keyword like “infused water bottle” by writing a blog post about how to infuse fruit like kiwis in your water using your special water bottle. When optimizing content, use the keyword you’re targeting throughout the post, including the keyword at the beginning of headers, using synonyms for the keyword in the post, and increasing the word count if you have more to say.
Use free tools
The best way to market your website is to use Google My Business, Yelp Biz, Yahoo Business, and Bing Places. These are all free tools to use to add your website, description, photos, hours, etc. Customers will find you when they do a search that matches your products or services in your local area.
Harris Brown
Stacy Caprio
Stacy Caprio, Founder of Growth Marketing acceleratedgrowthmarketing.com
Authentic Post
Try posting your business story in as many Facebook groups and niche online forums as possible, authentically written and from the heart, and make sure it includes a before/after transformation. Include your link at the end, and people will notice and click on it. This is a great way to promote your site and gain trust and new readers.
Using These Methods
Leverage Social media
First of all, you must do some research to figure out what are people’s concerns and issues that are related to your specific industry. You can take advantage of social media platforms such as LinkedIn groups or Facebook groups in your niche to see what people are talking about. After identifying their problems, you need to come up with the solutions.
Social media platforms are full of people looking to create and exchange information about specific topics, and providing them with this information is a very powerful way to establish a reputation as a thought leader in the space. Engage in insightful conversations with the group members and provide real value to the groups. Once you’ve done that, you can also promote your content in the group.
Start a blog
If you want to connect with your potential customers, you must start a blog. It’s essential for developing a trustworthy relationship with your audience. This is where you express your opinions and engage with your target audience. Your blog should be filled with meaningful and useful content that people are looking for. Your blog should have an overall tone or theme, so that people should be able to identify your brand’s unique “voice”.
You should use a combination of your blog and social media to develop a marketing strategy. You can interact with your audience both on your blog and social media. But most of your content, such as detailed articles etc., goes on your blog and you can use social media strategically to promote it.
Improve SEO
You need to focus on improving your website’s SEO to get more targeted traffic, and that, of course, leads to more conversions. For that, you need to have an effective content strategy in place. Always aim at producing quality content that is robust and ever-green. Make sure to frequently update it. Use a keyword research tool like Moz or Ahrefs to find out what competitors are ranking for, then create similar content.
You have to find keywords which may not have the highest search volume but which are your competitors are not targeting. This way you can rank faster by avoiding high-competition keywords. Then you should work on promoting that content piece through email outreach, social outreach. Moreover, you should ensure that your website loads fast, is mobile responsive, has internal linking in place (between various internal pages), and has SEO title and Meta description set up for each page.
Paid Advertisements
Paid advertisements, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads etc., is a great way increase traffic to a blog. Re-targeting is one of the most cost-effective and efficient methods of driving visitors to a blog. Every time you produce a long-form article that provides a large amount of value to readers, you should promote it to previous website visitors using Facebook re-targeting. You would consistently see a high number of engagements and social shares using this method.
Hamna Amjad
Sean Allan
Start With a Niche
First things first, you need to start with a niche. I see too many websites that are about all facets of a business. Nobody can be great at everything.
1. Figure out what you stand for, what you are good at and start writing and creating content about that niche. Provide real value, answer the big “who,” “what” and “why” questions about your topic. Note that these won’t convert but they will make a splash and get your website traffic.
2. Get familiar with Canva. You’re going to need great images and this is one resource that gives great creative work without a designer.
3. Network, network, network. Get yourself to events that are offline and start sharing your business card and your expertise.
What makes you different from everyone else?
Your website advertises something: A business, you, a mission, something. What is it and what makes you different from everyone else?
Who would be interested in what you have to offer? Don’t be vague: “Well, everyone!” Be specific. If there is a wide range of people, investigate why each group of people would want what you have. This is your prospect community.
Now, you need to find out how to reach that audience by delivering the messages that will resonate with them and show your website. Who are they? Where are they? What do they do? etc.
Start with 10 reasons people will want your site, 10 different prospect communities, and 10 ways you can reach them. By mixing and matching your answers to these questions you have over 300 Marketing campaign ideas. Good for one per week for three years.
Steve James
Ulysis Cababan
Offline marketing
1. SEO
2. SMM (Social Media Marketing)
3. Offline marketing
With the above mentioned tactics SEO and SMM give a huge impact in terms of online traffic since these are primarily involve your website and other external factors that is about your website that targeted people will be attracted to look at your website this is all organic, now to bring instant traffic business owners can leverage and use paid ads and bid for it to promote a website.
Digital PR
When marketing your website, you need to cover all bases:
• social media
• digital PR
• SEO
The aim with all of these is to increase visibility and brand awareness. Social media does this by helping you engage and communicate with your audience. Digital PR, such as interviews and guest posts in prominent online publications, gets your message out there in front of more people, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps your website pop up in search engines when people are searching for relevant keywords.
SEO is made up lots of different aspects, but there are a few key principles at the core of it that will help your website rank higher in search engines. These are:
• plenty of quality written content
• a fast site that is free from technical issues
• and building trust in your site through other sites linking to it.
Rachel Baker
This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors' statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.