The Begginer’s Guide To Promoting a Website

Having already created your new website, you will now need to promote it. Visitors will not come without some effort from your side. We can even say that creating your website is the easiest part. Bringing highly targeted and engaged traffic requires a lot of creativity and a lot of promotion. There are plenty of opportunities out there to promote your website. One thing to keep in mind is that not all of them will be suitable for you, but if you identify and use the right ones, you will most definitely see visitors coming to your site.

To help you with that, we have created a list of some good places where you can promote your content.

Social Media

Social media is probably the most popular free way marketers use to promote a website. According to a 2014 research by the Pew Research Center Facebook still has the most number of users, although growth has been slowing in the recent years. You can see the opposite trend in the other big players, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn. That is why many social media managers out there are paying much more attention to them.

To sum it up, if you want maximum exposure for your brand, be active in multiple social media. If you are a small business owner, it is highly possible that you do not have enough time to do everything on your own, so it is a good idea to think of hiring a person to manage social media marketing.

Keep in mind that posting random updates couple of times a day will not bring any success and you will only end up losing time and money. It is important to prepare a social media marketing strategy, which includes identifying target audience, setting clear objectives, time frames and measure the final efforts.

Do not forget also that setting aside some budget for advertising will definitely help you reach a bigger audience and raise brand awareness. You can check out this detailed guide by Buffer that will give you the necessary initial knowledge to start advertising on social media.

Social Media Bookmarking Sites

Social Media Bookmarking Sites are not as popular as social media, but you shouldn’t underestimate their power for bringing traffic to your website. What is actually a social media bookmarking site? It is a platform that allows users to browse through articles based on categories, interests, etc. In most case the first step is to submit your article in the social media bookmarking site. Then the more interesting visitors find your content, the more traffic you will see in your website.

The most popular social media bookmarking sites are StumbleUpon and Digg. StumbleUpon has a base of around 3 million unique visitors per month, which makes it a good opportunity for marketers and website owners.

What distinguishes StumbleUpon from other social media and social media bookmarking sites is the Stumble button. When clicked it takes users to a random webpage on the internet based on your interest. Then there are two options – Thumbs-Up or Thumbs-Down. What you should look for is that more visitors click Thumbs-Up when they see your content. That means that the most important factor is quality content. If you do that right, you can see huge traffic to your website. But keep in mind that StumbleUpon traffic is not as quality as from other sources as bounce rate tends to be big. Of course, that does not mean you should underestimate its power.

Search Engines

In order to realize just how important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is for your website, you need to understand that usually the most traffic come from search engines. That means in the best case scenario your visitors will find you when searching for relevant keywords in the search engines and not by browsing social media. That is why SEO is the most essential part of digital marketing.

The good news is that Oxxy makes it easier for you to increase your organic traffic (that is the traffic that comes from social media). If you use our platform to create your online presence, you can easily configure the most important SEO settings of your pages, such as page title, URL, description keywords, etc.

When it comes to SEO you must keep in mind that there is no way to rank well without quality content. Make sure that everything on your website is useful for the users and they will willingly share it with others.

According to Netmarketshare’s latest statistics Google has a global market share of 71.02%. The other to search engines that matter most to you are Yahoo (6.06%) and Bing (5.94%).

Keep in mind that one of the most important parts of SEO is measuring. When you measure your statistics (for example, through Google Analytics) you can see what works for you and where to improve your SEO. You can see more information about that in our guide for measuring the success of your website and in our list of useful SEO tools.

Requesting backlinks

Backlinks are a huge part of Search Engine Optimization, but as it is essential for making your website more popular we decided to give it a special place in our guide. What matters in link building is the quality of the websites that link to your pages. In the past you could easily get to the top of the search engine ranking page by getting tons of spammy backlinks. Now things are way different. If you want to promote your website through link building, you must understand that Google values quality over quantity.

Having that in mind, you may now realize that getting quality websites to link to your pages is very hard. You need quality content and a lot of marketing efforts to achieve that.

But why backlinks matter?

By now you may ask yourself why links matter when your goal is to promote your website. To answer this question you need to have an idea of how search engines find new pages on the web – through links. And Google’s algorithm is designed in such way that the more quality websites link to you, the more important it assumes your content is. That leads to higher rankings, more conversions, leads and sales.

There are plenty of link building strategies you can use – email outreach campaigns, PR, guest posting, etc.

Backlinko have assembled a nice list full of resources about link building that you can check out. You can also learn a lot about link building in Quicksprout’s Advanced Guide To Link Building.

Online Directories

Promoting a website through online directories is especially useful for companies as that is the place where many potential customers go when they look for a certain type of business. That is why web directories are not only a place for promoting your site, but also a place to look for new customers. To put it simply, online directories serve the same purpose as Yellow Pages did back in the days.

There are plenty directories out there where you can submit your link and get exposure. The most popular are Google Business, Bing, Yahoo Local and Yelp. When you put your website there make sure that you include all relevant information for your business, such as contacts, information about products and services you offer and relevant business categories.

Email Marketing

Building an email list is an essential part of every digital marketer’s work these days. You can use email marketing tactics for many different purposes – from sending informative newsletters every now and then to sending out information about new products or services.

A good start is to start collecting emails from existing customers and from potential ones. For example, if you sell something you can ask people to provide their email. A good idea is to provide a way for visitors to subscribe to your website. But unless the emails you send provide something really unique, people will not subscribe that easy. So it is a good idea to think of some incentive to offer them. For example, you can offer a one-time discount code to new subscribers.

Then you need to decide what tool to use to send out your emails. In our list of tools for small business owners we recommended MailChimp as it is cost-effective (actually, free for companies with not so big mailing lists) and easy to set up. Other good opportunities to check out are Sendy, AWeber, ExactTarget and Constant Contact.

Reaching out to influencers

First of all, we need to clarify what exactly is an influencer. That is a person that is highly active on blogs and social media and has a huge base of active followers – people that read and re-share what the influencer shares. Targeting influencer is one of the most beneficial way to raise your brand awareness and to actually find a lot of new customers.

Customers tend to trust and follow recommendations from people with expertise in a certain niche. That is why you need to spend some time reaching out to influencers who are willing to check out and share your website, product or service?

But how can we do that? The short answer is not easy. The essential part is having something of a great value. Influencer will not ruin their reputation by recommending something that is not good enough and are probably not even going to pay attention to you, if you offer them something mediocre.

Apart from that, you need to start researching for influencers and then reach out to them. You can check out more about how to that in KISSMetrics’ definitive guide to influencer targeting.

Online Forums and Discussion Lists

Another great way to promote your website is through participating in relevant online forums and discussion lists. Let’s take Quora, for example. Quora is a platform where users ask and answer questions. The website can serve great for inspiration and gaining more knowledge as you can find really professional answers there.

How to use it to promote your website?

Promoting your business through Quora and other such platforms is a little bit time consuming as just spamming with your link there will not get you anywhere. You need to participate in relevant discussion and give quality answers to questions. Once you start providing something valuable for the community, your reputation will raise and the same applies to your brand awareness.

Online forums are another great way to bring highly engaged traffic to your website. There are thousands of popular forums for almost every niche out there. The same rule for promoting a site applies here – you need to provide something valuable for the community by participating in discussions and engaging with other users.

The benefits of promoting a business through forums and discussion lists are great. Users that find your website through search engines are not as likely to buy something as users that come from forums. That is why you need to take some time and try to be active in at least one or two relevant online forums.

Traditional Advertising

In the whole article we were only speaking about digital marketing. Although that seems normal when we talk about promoting a website, you should not forget about traditional advertising when it comes to bringing more traffic.

One way to use “old media” for the purpose is to include your website URL in your business cards, leaflets and all other kind of advertising material. You could also put the address of your website in every other traditional advertising method – from TV and radio commercials to billboards, newspapers and magazines.

Measuring the results of such advertising methods is a bit harder, but one thing you need to remember is – although most of them are more expensive and need a professional to be hired, the results can be great. Traditional advertising tends to raise brand awareness a lot, especially if you offer some product or service. One of the advantages is that you can reach a totally different audience – people who do not use social media, do not participate in forums or even do not use the Internet.

Having all that in mind, you can now start promoting your online presence. And one final tip from us – all strategies we mentioned will be totally worthless if your website is not good enough. Make sure you do not have that problem by choosing OXXY Website Builder.

Want to create the perfect website for you? Why not start now?