According to AdWeek, 81 percent of consumers want to see a company’s website before they buy a product or service.
Some people visit a particular website directly, perhaps through a link they saw on social media, in an email marketing campaign, or in a blog post they read — but the majority, about 60 percent, begin by entering keywords into a search engine.
If potential customers don’t see your website through online searches, or through your other marketing channels, you’re not going to see much site traffic, and you’re not building your business.
The bottom line? There’s not much point in taking the time to construct a new website if you don’t have a plan to promote it.
How Do You Measure Success?
There are many metrics you can use to measure the success of your website, from bounce rate to traffic sources to keywords and conversion rate. Arguably, however, the most important is how much traffic you get. After all, if no one visits your site, the other metrics don’t make much difference.
The amount of web traffic you should be getting depends on what kind of business you have, and how large it is. For example, B2B companies with 11 to 25 employees get an average of 269 unique visitors each week. B2C companies of the same size get 685 unique visitors.
Whether your website hits that average benchmark, or does better or worse, is a function of how well your website promotion is and having a solid marketing strategy.
1. Email Marketing
The success of email marketing is all about growing your contact list, segmenting it to appeal to different groups of customers, and providing valuable content to encourage recipients to stay engaged. Always link to your website in your email call to action, and encourage repeat visits to your website by sending fresh content on a regular basis.
Are you collecting email addresses from your website visitors? See how five businesses grow their email lists with these website sign-up forms.
2. Personal Email Signature
You can include a link to your homepage or a specific landing page you want to promote. If the link is to your homepage, make sure it works like a landing page.
3. Search Engine Optimization
SEO, which will improve organic search engine rankings, is a complex process which involves optimizing your website for keywords, providing authoritative content, and increasing quality links to your site. By enhancing SEO, your website will appear near the top of search results for your specified keywords.
Not sure what keywords are relevant to your business? Use these tips to find the best keywords and get found online.
4. Pay-Per-Click Ads
Create paid ads to appear on search engines. The most popular paid ads are through Google AdWords. You tell Google how much you’re willing to spend and only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This is called pay-per-click advertising. Make sure that your ad links to a landing page that matches the copy in the ad (you don’t want to advertise hiking boots and send visitors to a page featuring umbrellas).
5. Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (with one billion users each) are a great way to promote your site and promote your blog if your site has one. Provide links to your homepage, blog or other website pages (depending on the nature of the content) in your social media posts and bios.
6. YouTube
About 1 billion people use YouTube every month. That fact, combined with the enormous popularity of video, makes YouTube a natural for promoting your website. Be sure to include a call to action in your video with a link back to your website, and give viewers a good reason to go there.
7. Guest Blogging
Identify leading websites in your market niche and offer to write guest blogs for them. Be sure to include a link to your website in the blog post, for example, in your bio at the end of the article.
If you don’t consider yourself much of a writer or are just getting started with content marketing, here are some content marketing basics to get you started.
8. Retargeting
If you shop at Walmart online, you might notice ads for the products you just purchased, or similar Walmart products, on other websites. That’s achieved through retargeting, a cookie-based technology that involves inserting a special code on your website. When visitors come to your site, the code attaches a cookie to that visitor’s browser. That makes it possible to display ads for your website on other sites across the web, increasing the visibility of your site and the products and services you offer.
Wrap Up
Promoting your website to increase web traffic and boost sales in a multi-step process that requires careful consideration, thought, and planning.
The first step in the process is finding the right domain name and choosing a host for your website. Take the first step by visiting Bluehost today to set up your domain name and web hosting.
Then, check back with this list to make sure you’re promoting your website everywhere you can.
Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan helps businesses lock down their marketing. As CEO of BJC Branding and a professional speaker, Bryan travels the country, presenting on a wide range of digital marketing topics. Bryan is also one of the nation’s first Master Certified Local Experts with Constant Contact.
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