How to Market and Promote a Website
I’m frequently asked about how to market a website. It’s important to understand that there are two sides to web marketing: generating traffic (visitors) to your website; and getting those visitors to do something when they get to the website.
Marketing a website is about that first step, getting people to the website. There are some very clear steps to following in marketing your website.
First, you need to be clear on the keywords that will bring people to your website. This requires answering the question: What will people who are looking for my product or service type into a search engine? There are likely hundreds if not thousands of possibilities. Keyword research is a major topic in itself, and a foundational skill of internet marketing.
Two quick ways to get started are to use the Google keyword tool, which is free. And another way is to go to the sites of those who are offering the same or similar products and services, and see which keywords their sites are optimized for. You do this by looking at the words in their title tags, description tags, and of course the page content itself.
Once you’ve settled on 1-3 keyword phrases to use to market your website, make sure your pages are optimized for those keywords. For instance, if you were a marketing consultant, you would likely have the phrase “marketing consultant” and “marketing consultant + your location” show up in your title, description and page copy. As with keyword research, on site or on page optimization is a very important internet marketing skill.
Once your pages are optimized, you are ready to actively market and promote your website. Here are some important tasks to perform at this stage of the process:
1) If you are a local business, get listed in the Google local business listing.
2) Consider making a video promoting your product or service and uploading it to YouTube, using your keywords as the title.
3) If you have developed a good mailing list of people interested in your products and services, you can market your website by sending them an announcement giving them a good reason to check it out.
4) Add the URL of your website to your email signature so that everyone you email sees and has the option of clicking on your website domain.
5) Make value-added comments on related blogs, putting your website address in the appropriate box when you post.
6) If you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media sites you can let your contacts know about your site, and also add it to your profile were it is allowed.
7) You can run a PPC (pay per click) campaign using your keywords to get people to your website very quickly.
You can use your business card, newspaper ads, online classifieds with your website URL highly visible.
This is really just a sampling of how to market a website. In summary, use your keywords and your URL to make people aware of your website and encourage them to visit it.
Daren Wride
Kelowna Internet Marketing Consultant