4 Ways To Market Your Website

4 Ways To Market Your Website

It’s very common for new webmasters to have inflated expectations for their websites. It is often thought that traffic will generate itself once the site has been launched and that the sole fact of having a website is going to bring in a lot of extra revenue and a large amount of new customers. But while this is certainly possible, it is rather unlikely to happen in the absence of a sound marketing plan.

Here’s something to think about: as of December 2012, there were 634 million websites on the internet, of which 51 million were launched in 2012 alone. Your website is but one of these many millions. If you want to generate high traffic, you’re going to have to make it easy for your target audience to learn about the existence of your site and offer them compelling reasons to visit it. In other words: you’re going to have market your website in order to make it stand out among an enormous crowd.

Here are a few of the most effective ways to market your site:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you’ve ever looked at your website’s visitor statistics, you’ve probably noticed that a sizable chunk of your traffic comes from search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. By implementing SEO practices and concepts into your overall web strategy, it is possible to greatly increase this traffic.

SEO is the science (though some would call it an art) to improve your website’s ranking for important keyword phrases in major search engines. For example: if you have a site that promotes a bakery in Baltimore, it’s easy to see how you would benefit if your site came up as the first result when someone Googles ‘bakery in Baltimore’.

Higher rankings can be achieved in a number of ways. Your web designer can optimize your website and add keyword-rich metadata and page titles. Your writers can create content that is specifically meant to make your site rank higher. And you or an SEO company can work to increase the number of links on other websites that point to yours (a crucial variable in ranking algorithms).

Bear in mind that a good SEO strategy takes time to generate results, so don’t expect huge traffic gains in a few days because that’s not quite how it works.

2. Ads

Another way to generate traffic is through the use of ads. Services like Google AdWords allow you to boost your site straight to the top of the search results for a price. With PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, you set a specific budget for your ad campaign (for example: a maximum of 10 dollars per day for the search phrase ‘bakery in Baltimore’) and you then pay a fixed price every time someone clicks on your ad and visits your site.
Some alternatives include Facebook Ads, retargeting ads (which use cookies to entice previous visitors to your site to come back) and banner exchanges with other websites.

3. Content Creation

On the net, everything revolves around content. If you can serve your visitors fresh, original and interesting content on a regular basis, you will slowly gain a loyal following. This is why you should consider starting a blog and updating it with stuff that you know your visitors are going to like.

An even better strategy – especially if you currently don’t have a lot of traffic – is to create original content for other websites. Write guest posts on popular blogs and link to your site. Upload an interesting video on YouTube and link to your site. Write a helpful post on a forum and – well you’re probably catching our drift by now.

4. Social Media And E-Mail Marketing

You can also direct more traffic to your website by leveraging the power of social media and e-mail marketing. Use special attractions like ads, contests or particularly amazing content to get people to subscribe to your e-mail list and/or to your Facebook or Twitter page. Once you’ve got some followers, send them superb content to keep them hooked on your brand.

Don’t forget to remind your followers and subscribers to return to your website. It’s easy to think a large Facebook following translates directly into higher traffic for your website and more revenue for your business, but this is not necessarily the case. E-mail marketing and social media can be of huge help for your overall marketing strategy, but never forget that your primary goal is growing your business, not becoming a social media magnate!