In today’s world having a website isn’t considered a luxury, but has become a necessity for businesses. People nowadays have become accustomed to using the internet and it becomes jarring if your business doesn’t have a website. Still, over 28% of small businesses don’t have a website which ends up having a detrimental effect on their business. This is a significant missed opportunity, especially since 76% of consumers say they frequently research a company’s web presence before visiting it in person. However, if you have already built a website for your business and it’s not attracting any traffic then we know where the problem lies.
Building a website is only half the job, the other half is promoting that website. There’s no point in your business having a website if nobody is aware of its existence. And promoting a website ideally shouldn’t come after you’ve already launched your website. The preparation for promotion should start way before. In this article, we’re going to cover the methods for you to promote your new website. We’ll also tackle how you can promote your existing website (if you have one).
Methods for Promoting Your New Website
1. Utilizing the Power of social media
Social media is one of the most innovative tools out there that you can use to spread the word about your impending website launch. It doesn’t matter if you already have a website or you’re planning to launch one pretty soon, social media can be a great help in both cases. According to research, over 45% of the world’s population uses social media regularly. Even if you didn’t have a website before, we’re hoping your company has a presence on different social media platforms as they’re one of the best ways to promote any brand, no matter how big or small.
- When marketing the debut of your website, you should blend paid and organic articles to maximize your reach. Because only a small fraction of your audience will see your website if you only use paid ads, the average reach for organic posts on Facebook has dropped to 5.2%.
- To enhance visibility and reach by pushing a timeline post to those who don’t already follow your social media account, you can use boosted posts if diving into the realm of Facebook advertising seems scary.
- Additionally, social media “teaser” posts are a terrific method to give your audience a sneak peek at the new (or revamped) website and a quick overview of what to expect from it.
- Keep your followers informed by regularly providing updates about the new site before, on the day of, and immediately after the debut.
- Your social media posts can reach a wider audience if you tag your team members and the firm that assisted with website design. Don’t forget to urge your staff to publish their messages urging visitors to visit the new website.
2. Send Out Emails to Your Customers
Email marketing is a fantastic alternative if you’re searching for a tried-and-true way to advertise to your customers. Over the course of your business’s existence, you’ve likely amassed a sizable collection of client contact information. You can contact the folks you already do business with directly using client emails or even physical addresses. These current clients are among the most likely to visit your new website and perhaps even make a purchase there.
You will want to change the tone and content from the more general announcements you make on social media because these announcements are typically sent to those who have previously done business with you in the past.
However, customers should be informed, for instance, that using the internet will make scheduling appointments and making purchases simpler and quicker. Alternately, you may also draw attention to brand-new features, like a blog where you’ll share useful industry advice. These are only a few examples of how you can tailor the messaging based on your previous encounters. Just be careful not to send too many emails to your customers. Sending a teaser email before the website launches and a second email with a reminder on launch day might be a wise choice. If you bombard them with communications, you run the risk of having people unsubscribe from your email list.
If you already have a website then it’s simple to launch an email marketing campaign after your website is up and running, and there are numerous email marketing platforms available that you can use for free or on a tight budget.
3. Publish a Press Release
It is a common misconception that a company needs to be Fortune 500 or be one of the top players in the industry for them to be able to receive any significant press coverage, but that’s not the case. Even though a small firm might not receive coverage for its new or revamped website in the national newspaper, there’s always the option to go to local news organizations, business association newsletters, trade magazines, and even networking groups that may be interested in your impending website launch.
So, we suggest you contact any of these organizations to publish a press release announcing your new or revamped website so that everyone in the community would know to keep a look out for it. However, while releasing a press statement there are a few things that you need to keep in mind.
- Your press statement should be quite succinct and should include all pertinent information about the launch of your website. Nobody wants a press release to be lengthy so don’t go overboard with the information, but also don’t leave out the important information that one might need to be curious about your website launch.
- Don’t make your statement full of information about all the new features of your website. Only keep important information that a potential customer most definitely needs to know.
- Instead of being overly promotional and focusing on the specific features of the new website, your press release should have a new feel to it. Don’t make it full of information that would bore the readers (potential customers), and instead focus more on talking about how it can make users’ lives easy and how it aligns with the image of your brand.
- For instance, it is absolutely worth stating if the client will now be able to place orders online.
- Moreover, journalists may perceive the press release as more newsworthy if you include any pertinent statistics or a comment from an employee of your business. They’ll find the information they need from credible sources to produce their articles on the debut of your website.
4. Make the website’s countdown clock visible.
One of the best ways to promote your website by intriguing the audience is to have a placeholder page that users can access even if the website isn’t finished. If you have already used an active website as part of your business plan, this can be very crucial.
Website visitors will be informed when to return and check out the entire experience by something as simple as placing a banner on the home page that reads “Our new and improved site is coming soon” followed by a launch date (or even a countdown timer). While your website is still being built, you can use one of the many “coming soon” themes and designs as a stand-in.
While a straightforward image would undoubtedly do the trick, you could go a step further by giving a bulleted list of the new features and enhancements visitors to the updated site may anticipate. Or can get creative and use interesting themes to showcase the construction of the website. Create a page that’ll show the audience what to wait for and try to build intrigue in the audience to see the finished website of your business.
Just be sure to stick to the anticipated launch date and remove the “coming soon” page once the complete website is operational.
5. Utilize additional online marketing tactics.
You can utilize a range of digital marketing platforms to spread the word about your impending website launch. For owned media, you might write a blog post outlining the upcoming changes and post it to your current website. An additional blog post on the updated website listing all the improvements that should come after this. This not only provides your visitors with more information they can utilize, but it can help improve your SEO. You could create blog-style content on your LinkedIn account if you don’t already have a website where you may submit blog entries. If writing isn’t your thing, you could also make a video discussing the new website or perhaps give viewers a sneak peek at the ongoing work.
Of course, in these circumstances, your content won’t typically be primarily focused on the website launch itself. You must share your business thoughts with the blog’s audience in order to add value. The new audiences you reach through these networks will be far more likely to be interested in checking out the content of your new site if you share informative stuff.
6. Go for Guest Blogging
An underappreciated yet excellent method of gaining links to your new website is guest blogging. Using this technique, you create a guest post for a well-known blog in your business (or a related one) to demonstrate your subject-matter expertise. You can send traffic from a trustworthy source back to your new website by having each guest post link to it at least once.
Without your fault, it could be difficult to get a guest writing space on some websites, whether you’re a new company or in marketing. Many websites either carefully vet who guest blogs for them or don’t accept submissions at all, as writing guest posts for other publications used to be a hugely popular SEO practice.
The most important thing to keep in mind when guest blogging is that it’s more about developing relationships with the publisher and your audience than it is about SEO. You can increase traffic to your website and make contacts in your sector if you can establish a partnership with a publication and frequently submit fresh content.
7. Make a strong first impression.
Regardless of the strategy you employ to let your audience know about the impending website launch, there is no assurance that they will rush to the new site as soon as they find out about it.
Keep in mind that when your customers interact with you, they want to receive something worthwhile. Offering clients who visit the site on launch day exclusive, limited-time deals is one of the finest strategies to increase traffic to your website (or possibly even pre-launch). This might be in the form of a discount on their initial online purchase, a discount on their first month of service, or even a free special item with their order. This may lower the initial profit margins on purchases made through your website, but it will also offer your audience an opportunity to visit it. If they have a good initial experience, they are far more likely to return for subsequent purchases, which will speed up the process of recovering your development and maintenance costs.
Of course, you can motivate people outside of your target audience to enhance the launch of your website as well. For instance, offering a commission bonus for referrals that use your site could result in a win-win situation for all parties if you have a referral or commissions program with important business partners.
To Sum it Up
It takes a lot of work to launch a website; you don’t want all that work to be in vain if there is little to no traffic on your website. You can make sure that your website develops into a significant online presence for your company that helps promote awareness and even increases leads and sales by putting these promotional methods into practice. You can start your website promotion early on and effectively use the 6 aforementioned strategies to advertise a new website.
However, the world of website promotion isn’t limited to these few tactics. Read further if you want to know how to promote an existing website to garner more traffic which subsequently would increase sales of the product or service you’re offering.
Methods for Promoting an Existing Website
8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Unquestionably, the most effective thing you can do to promote your website is search engine optimization or SEO. If you don’t make your website search engine friendly, you run the danger of it becoming lost in the more than 2 billion websites on the internet and the new ones being generated every second. You don’t need the money to employ an SEO expert because there are plenty of free online resources that may assist you to enhance the SEO of your website. Most SEO issues on your website may typically be resolved by you on your own with a few straightforward tweaks.
On-page SEO and off-page SEO are the two key factors to consider when examining the SEO of your website.
- As you may anticipate, everything that is visible on your website is considered on-page SEO. This includes your website copy, graphics, videos, Meta descriptions, responsive design, and even the organization of your website.
- Off-page SEO is the term for off-page activities. This contains information about your website such as who is linked to it, its authority, and reader engagement.
While you will occasionally need to make tweaks, search engine optimization is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your website because, once everything has been optimized, it mostly produces traffic without much input. Don’t expect a quick fix, though; you should be aware that it may take months to see benefits from this approach.
9. Quora
Quora is probably already familiar to you if you frequently use the internet because of how frequently it appears in search results. Although Quora might come across as a little overrated or spammy, it’s surprisingly an effective place to advertise your website.
For those of you who are not familiar, Quora is a website that enables users to post questions for the community to respond to. For long-tail keyword searches, Quora results frequently appear on the first page of Google because it is so well-liked by users and individuals marketing their businesses.
Quora’s reputation as spam is primarily due to the fact that it’s an effective platform for business promotion. Additionally, if something is proven to be successful, low-quality marketers and bots will always use it without regard for the value it provides to the consumer, just like with the majority of other promotional channels.
If you utilize Quora wisely, it can be a terrific distribution tool for your content marketing plan as well as a great tool for promoting your website and showcasing your expertise. Simply create an account, answer questions about your sector or niche, and remember to include a link back to your website somewhere in your response. This may be a link to a blog post where you’ve already addressed a user’s query or a link to your website’s ‘About Us’ page so that users can see your credentials.
10. Pay-Per-Click Promotion
Even if you just have a small budget, pay-per-click, or PPC advertising is a simple approach to marketing your website. This type of digital marketing may be considered one of the more traditional channels, but it is widely used because it is an effective approach to increasing website traffic and targeting particular demographics.
The most popular PPC advertising tool, Google AdWords, is a fantastic place to start. You may easily build advertisements with Google AdWords based on the terms you’ve discovered through keyword research, and you only pay for that advertising when a person clicks on the link.
However, there is no predetermined cost associated with using Google AdWords. Every time a user searches for your keyword on this platform, your ad is automatically submitted into an auction. The advertiser with the higher click-through rate (CTR) will typically prevail, but the position of their ad (where it appears in the search results) will also depend on other elements including keyword relevancy, CTR, and overall ad performance.
Google AdWords is among the greatest strategies to promote your website or blog for a small business wishing to invest money in distribution. If you have a stringent advertising budget to stick to, you can easily configure Google AdWords so that your ads won’t be put up for auction again until the budget for that time is used up. You won’t have to worry about spending money carelessly or endlessly.
There are also many businesses, like eSearch Logix, that provide digital marketing services like PPC to help push your brand to the top.
11. Online Communities
Many online communities allow you to add content to their website. To locate new and popular products, for instance, thousands of individuals visit Product Hunt every day. A fantastic approach to get things off naturally is to post your website on Product Hunt. Hacker News is also a fantastic community where you can upload material and is similar to Reddit. This is a fantastic forum for discussing current events in technology and the developer world.
You can post to a wide variety of media aggregators in addition to online communities. These websites concentrate on compiling a database of articles pertaining to a particular industry. For instance, Designer News enables users to post design-related links in public. Online communities and media aggregators are fantastic since it’s simple to post there, you can link back to your website from there, and if you submit user content, it might get spread.
As we proceed, it becomes clear that having a community connected to your website has several advantages. The most advantageous part of promotion is probably word of mouth. When members of the community believe that their contributions will be valuable to others, the system will begin to function naturally. However, you might be able to affect word-of-mouth by providing folks with a good cause to discuss, like a recent study you released or a new feature on your website that could affect people positively.
12. Leverage the presence of micro-influencers
Social media platforms can be quite a blessing when it comes to promotion and marketing. Earlier we discussed how you can leverage different social media platforms to promote your new or old website. Every business should have its social media handle across all popular platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., and should be active on these platforms to garner organic traffic on the business website.
But social media doesn’t stop giving here. You can also use other people’s social media presence to promote your own content or website. Now, it would everyone’s dream to have A-list celebrities promote their business, however, that could require a lot of effort or money. Instead, what you can do is get micro-influencers to promote your brand.
A network of micro-influencers in many areas has emerged as a result of the introduction of Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Influencers in the arts, the culinary world, and the beauty industry all have large followings. There are athletes, health experts, and micro-celebrities in gaming. Additionally, if you follow these influences, you may anticipate paid brand shoutouts.
Make contact with well-known online influencers and offer them money to promote your website or product on their content. That will result in a significant increase in website traffic. Once more, it need not be a celebrity like Justin Bieber or Zendaya. You can get in touch with small-but-dedicated followers of your industry’s micro-influencers. Give them a reason to promote your website (like a free item) and let them take it from there.
13. Get backlinks
Search engine marketing was briefly discussed at the beginning of the article. In order to decide how fantastic your website is and whether or not it merits a high search engine ranking, Google’s algorithms consider a number of different elements. One fantastic approach to demonstrate to Google that your website is trustworthy is to consistently create outstanding blog content and share it with the world, but it’s not the only way.
How many links connect back to your website is another important ranking element for Google. To put it another way, the more well-known and reputable websites that link to your website in their content, the more likely it is that Google will rank your website higher on the search engine results pages.
You can obtain backlinks to your website in a number of ways. You might start by expanding your network of links in the following places:
- Offer to write a guest post for another website in exchange for links to your blog.
- Create a piece that serves as the “ultimate guide” for your industry that other websites will find useful and want to connect to.
- After you’ve published an article, get in touch with influential people in the business and ask them to link to it.
- Find blog entries that mention your website but do not contain a link, and request that they do so.
- Offer quotes in exchange for a link to establish yourself as a source for bloggers and journalists.
- Obtain forum connections
The process of building up your link profile takes time, just like blogging does. Keep doing outreach while being gentle with yourself. Your efforts will eventually be rewarded.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that internal links are also significant for search engine marketing. Internal links are links to other pages on your website that you insert inside your content. For illustration, suppose you have a blog post about how to apply foundation and another post about how to apply makeup. You may include a link in your makeup post regarding how to apply foundation. That is recognized by search engines like Google as a useful internal link.
14. Giveaways for your customers
Finally, one of the finest ways for your company to engage with clients and advertise your website is by offering them giveaways or freebies. It is a fantastic method to get people interested in your products, stimulate interest in your website, and even forge connections with other businesses that are related to your industry.
Remember that using giveaways for marketing goals is essential when using them. Therefore, for them to be beneficial, they must have a positive return on investment (ROI). While selecting a good or service to provide as a prize or designing your giveaway make sure you’re keeping ROI in mind.
Similar to the previous point, if the entry fee is greater than the prize’s perceived value, customers won’t bother to enter the contest. So that you don’t run into any problems later, make sure the regulations are cleared up front. Make the entrance fee related to your ultimate objective of increasing website traffic. Common entrance prices that promote website traffic include things like a specific Facebook page, signing up for an email newsletter, or even visiting a specific landing page.
Running a giveaway that is concentrated on the objectives you wish to achieve is crucial. Since you want people to go to your website, it should serve as the “hub” of your giveaway and be the place where they go to learn more.
Conclusion
A website can be an effective tool for making sure that your brand is seen. Knowing how to advertise a new website is crucial for turning it into a pillar of your business’s operations and sales, whether you’re revamping an outdated website to make it more effective and in line with modern design trends or ultimately establishing a site.
So, what we’ve understood from this article is that advertising your website can be as important as building it. You indeed need to spend time, money, and resources to build a website, but we’d suggest you spend a small chunk of that budget on devising a marketing plan for the website.
Use the aforementioned methods to make sure your website reaches its target audience and also helps your business get more leads that can be turned into loyal customers. If you need help in building or marketing your website, you can reach out to the competent digital marketing and development team at eSearch Logix.
