Last week we talked about business website promotion. The overview in that post is how you should approach website promotion marketing.
Think of your website as having four areas:
1. Design
2. Content
3. Promotion
4. Conversion
The interesting thing is these don’t necessarily come in any specific order.
Most seem to start with design and content. Some designers would recommend creating the content first. I would agree with these designers.
From there you have to work on promoting your content and the business, you can start working on promotion even as your website is in development.
Conversion is usually the final step, but any good salesperson will tell you that you should be able to close a sale without any marketing materials. It’s probably a good idea to focus on getting a customer or two before investing in anything including a website. Find out if there are customers for your business before jumping into the expensive marketing materials.
Once you have a proven business model you can add a website because it will make things easier on you and it will bring in more customers.
Let’s get back on track here…
The Basics: Website Promotion Marketing
Here are the areas we covered in the last post:
1. Paid Advertising
2. SEO
3. Word of Mouth and Social Media
4. Sponsorships
5. Press
6. Email
Now, let’s discuss specific things you can do in each of these areas to promote your website.
1. Paid Advertising Strategies
AdWords is usually the place people go for Paid Advertising. Google has built one of the best advertising platforms around their search product. The great thing is you kind of know what the intent is when people search for keywords. You can create ads based on those keywords and bring qualified traffic to your site. Even better, you can ease into things with a low budget.
Facebook advertising is another area where you can advertise a different way. On Facebook, you target people based on the information in their profile.
That is where I would start. I admit that I don’t know much about paid advertising. I’ve tinkered with AdWords and Facebook, but haven’t done much to know much.
Depending on your company, customers and industry there might be additional advertising opportunities. Don’t forget about things like radio and print. Local businesses with older customers could do well with this form of advertising.
It’s not uncommon to see a 40 year old reading the newspaper even though they are still familiar with what a website is and they will visit websites for information.
2. SEO Strategies
All right, now we’re getting into my bread and butter.
It’s important to consider SEO in every aspect of your business that will relate to the Internet.
For example, the person in charge of naming your products and services should have knowledge of SEO. This means that if you’re selling shirts that you know if your customer is searching for the word “shirt” or “tee”. You want to make sure you name your products using the terms your customers are using.
If your customers use “tees” then it make sense to call the category “Tees” and you might name a shirt the Spring Tee instead of the Spring Shirt. Use your brand names when naming items, but also be aware of what people are searching for online.
The too you want to use is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
Bookmark that page. You’ll be using it all the time for your online marketing and promotion.
Always uses the [Exact] setting for traffic. That gives you traffic for that exact term. Other variations will be a bonus.
The next step to getting traffic to your site on a regular basis is creating a business blog.
Here is what we do with every new client at Ghost Blog Writers.
The first step is creating an editorial calendar. We research the company, the industry and the customer. We use the keyword tool to find what the customer is searching for online. We look for keywords that are part of what’s called the “longtail”.
The reason we do this is because we can usually find opportunity to rank for keywords that don’t have a ton of competition. The tool will tell you the competition for the paid ads on the results page, but it’s a good indication of how competitive the term is for natural rankings too.
Compare the traffic, competition and check out the results page.
If you find a term that has 300 monthly searches with no paid ads and moderate natural competition you have a winner. Create what you feel is the best piece of content for that term.
It’s reasonable to think you can rank on the first page or even in the top five. That means perhaps 20-50% of the traffic from that term coming to your site.
That’s 60-150 visitors each month for just one blog post.
Multiply that by the number of posts you create and you have a stream of qualified traffic coming to your site forever.
3. Word of Mouth and Social Media Strategies
The other way to use a blog is to bump up your social media traffic.
First off, word of mouth and social media word of mouth are a result of how good you do your job. If you have an awesome product and have awesome people then others will recommend you. It really has nothing to do with marketing other than the fact that you are great at what you do.
So get good at what you do to get word of mouth.
But to get a little more traffic from social media you can use a strategy we use at GBW.
We write about other people in the industry.
Here are two recent examples we did on the Ghost Blog Writers Blog.
1. Analyzing The FreshBooks Blog Strategy
2. Blogging Pays Off for First Foundation
In both cases we talked about these organizations. It’s something that’s interesting to our target reader, but it is also an attempt to get those organizations to talk about us in return or to simply promote the posts to their audiences.
First Foundation tweeted the post and FreshBooks tweeted theirs as well.
To grow a website you have to tap into other audiences. One way to do this is to write about the people and the organizations that have an audience similar to the one you want to build.
4. Sponsorship Strategies
This strategy is similar to the social media strategy. You’re looking for exposure to another audience.
This strategy can work for a variety of different businesses. I’ve see it happen great for local companies.
One example is happening in just a few weeks for me. I’m participating in a bean bag toss contest. The local chamber is hosting the event, but the sponsor and location of the event is a local sports bar.
The people in the chamber are local and they like to eat and have a good time. By offering to sponsor the event and host it the bar is getting exposure to a new audience. People have a reason to come and visit. That first visit gives the bar a chance to win over new customers.
You can apply this strategy online with things like co-hosted webinars and other things.
5. Press Strategies
Press is a lot more work than I originally anticipated. You have to work at it constantly if you want to get exposure.
Find the publications that have your target audience. See if you can offer quotes about topics. See if you can approach the writers with ideas for stories. Remember to focus on what’s best for the readers in the audience. You can’t focus on yourself.
6. Email Strategies
Email is pretty straight forward. We talked about it in the last post. It’s something you should have on your blog. You want to build your list because it gives you permission to market to your target audience.
The best way I have found to get new subscribers is to offer something for free like a free guide or other similar free content.
Conclusion
Website promotion marketing is about getting exposure to other audiences. These tips above should give you ways to get started.
You don’t have to wait for your website to be finished. Start working on the promotion now so you can get things rolling. Then you’ll have things to build on once your site is live.
