Effective Ways to Promote Your Website
Promoting your website can be a daunting task:
it feels like there are thousands of ways to do it, but all of them take
a lot of time or money for no guaranteed return. To help solve this problem,
I've compiled a list of ten easy ways to promote your website.
We'll begin with the assumption that your
site is brand new and that you haven't done any website promotion work
yet. However, that doesn't mean that you can't use this information if
you have submitted to a few search engines or registered your site with
a couple of directories. If you notice that there are some things you have
already done, feel free to simply skip over them.
1. Advertise in the Media. Now, you might
have already ruled out advertising in newspapers and the like as too expensive,
especially since the chances are your audience doesn't live in any specific
local area. That mostly rules out radio, too, and TV is even more likely
to be out of your reach. What you might not have realised, though, is that
you should stop looking at the general media and start looking at the specialist
media for your area. For example, if you run a house-buying website, you
could advertise it in specialist property magazines, and even on 'lifestyle'
cable channels that show programmes about moving home.
2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If
your business has any physical objects, whether it's a product, a carrier
bag or just the front of your office, make sure to write your web address
on there. Even if people don't keep or remember the exact address, it at
least lets them know that your website exists.
3. Give Out Leaflets. There's nothing wrong
with a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you
can. The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific demographic
rather than an area, but the post office will be surprisingly helpful when
it comes to getting your leaflets where they need to go, if you ask them.
4. Go to Specialist Events. If there's
some kind of trade fair for the industry your website is in, turn up to
it and promote your website. While there might not be all that many people
there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get your site
talked about.
5. Put it on Business Cards. It should
go without saying, but once you've gone to all that trouble to set up a
website, don't forget to put it on your business cards. After all, if you're
relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option
of reading more about you on your website?
6. Astroturf on Forums. An often overlooked
way of getting traffic to your website is to participate on forums related
to the subject and put your web address in your signature. This gets you
more traffic than you'd think, especially at very popular forums.
7. Create Controversy. A great trick to
promote your website is to use it to say controversial things: as the saying
goes, any publicity is good publicity. This works best if you say something
that you know will be provocative to a certain kind of person, getting
it linked from all over the place. Bear in mind, though, that this strategy
is better for advertising-driven websites than it is if you're trying to
build a reputation and make sales directly.
8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more
businesses are starting blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you're
using your blog to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it's
useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, 'views not news' - make
sure your blog has something interesting to say.
9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem
to think it's some kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising
can work very well, especially with keywords that aren't already cluttered
with ads. If you do it right, you can get very targeted ads very cheap
- indeed, ironically, the more targeted the ads, the cheaper they tend
to be.
10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally,
if you're selling something, don't forget that old standby of web marketing:
the affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they can
sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you've got a crack sales
team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan is that everyone is
doing it, so you'll need to offer a high percentage of your profits to
your affiliates to make the offer attractive to them.
Author: Information supplied and written
by Lee Asher of Eclipse
Domain Services Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
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