About Website Promotion
Website promotion is all about getting traffic. There are many website promotion methods. Some methods are online and others are offline. No matter which website promotion method you use, the goal is the same to increase exposure for your website. Increased exposure will lead to more traffic. More traffic will generate more money from the sale of products, services, or advertising on your website.
Website promotion is done after doing keyword research. This is important. And you must have done your keyword research before starting. Once you know what words and phrases are popular and correct for your website, you can start promoting your website for these phrases.
Website promotion methods are varied, and you should match them to your personality. If you are not an outgoing person, you should not try and do tweets or Facebook which involve a lot of social activity. Other methods involve Directory Submission, Press Releases, Social Bookmarking, Article Submission, Forum Posting, and Freebies. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. The key to picking one and start with it and then as time allows adding on more methods of promotion.
Remember that the purpose of website promotion is to increase exposure, gain backlinks, and ultimately increase your ranking in the SERPs giving you more traffic. Ultimately you will want to monetize your traffic from your website promotion efforts. Hopefully, your efforts in website promotion will bring in the right kind of traffic and produce a lot of sales or clicks on advertisers’ links.
Before You Start
Before you start website promotion, you need to do several things. These things will ensure that you get the most from your website promotion efforts.
The first thing is, do your keyword research. Hopefully you will have done this before you created your website. You want to have the keyword that are right for your type of website. You want to pick keywords that are winnable.
In addition to doing your keyword research, you will want to research your look. The look of your website is very important in getting people to visit from directories and search engines. Many will show what your website looks like.
Also, you will want to hang around in some forums to get a feel of what your potential market is interested in or needs.
Next, you want to do is to decide what kind of promotion method to use. There are many and some are better suited for different personality types than others.
Finally, you want to decide what you will be doing with people once you get them. Will they just browse or will you send them to a squeeze page or an order page, or a sales letter. You will also, want to have some method to measure your success.
No matter which method you use, you probably will need a few free email accounts and to check the resource page for tools that will make you more productive.
Promotional Methods
There are many promotional methods that you can use. You will want to use more than one to gain the most traffic. Some promotional methods are based on what you do to your website, and others are offsite promotional methods, and finally, you can have offline promotional methods.
Onsite Promotional Methods
Onsite promotional methods for the most part you have control over. These include website structure optimization, webpage optimization. These all require Keyword Research before doing Website Optimization. Additional methods include: providing social plugins, providing RSS feeds, providing a newsletter, Freebies, and online contests. One of the most overlooked is your meta description. This is what people see when your website is listed in the search engines. Make it inviting, so people will want to visit. Don’t forget to use forums to get information about your potential customers. You can learn a lot about what people want or need by reading posts.
Offsite Promotional Methods
Offsite promotional methods are varied and provide you with lots of options to promote your website. Some popular methods include Directory Submission, Social Bookmarking, Blog Commenting, Guest Blogging, YouTube Videos, Twitter and Facebook pages, online classifieds, Press Releases, Q&A; Websites. Some people prefer to get traffic from forums and others prefer to get links from forums to increase PR and ranking for keywords. Don’t forget E-zines and Newsletters for getting targeted traffic.
Offline Methods
Offline methods include Press Releases, classified ads, radio and TV ads, business cards, flyers, t-shirts, putting your URL on your car, putting your URL on every outgoing thing, sponsorships, and news stories.
The important thing to remember is to combine different methods to get the most traffic from your efforts. Always be willing to try new website promotional methods. Always use methods that go with your personality style.
Promotion Checklist
- Do your keyword research for content, the text of inbound links, and niches.
- Research people’s wants, needs, and desires in your niche.
- Create different titles and descriptions. Have descriptions of different lengths.
- Make sure that each page has unique titles and descriptions.
- Make sure that each page has a link that points to your domain.
- Set redirection so that all pages redirect to either a WWW before the domain or domain without the WWW. All the pages of your website should be either domain/page or www. domain/page, but not both.
- Grammar and spell-check content.
- Grammar and spell-check promotional content. Descriptions and titles are used for promoting your website.
- Validate your pages and your CSS stylesheet.
- Create some free email accounts. Used for promoting in directories, social bookmarking, and forums.
- Research how others are marketing their site in your chosen promotional method(s).
- Get SEO plugins. These plugs will allow you to see IP Addresses if links are dofollow, and more.
- Get browser plugins to speed up a submission.
- Have a list of URLs to your webpages and a description and a keyword title for each page. Useful for directories that allow deep links and for social bookmarking websites.