Promote my Website 04-11-17 softwareplus.org

7 Ways to Promote Your New Website and Increase Traffic

Having a website is crucial in today’s market but without traffic it’s not going to turn your business into a success. In this article, were going to look at a range of ways you can promote your new website online and offline, in order to get as much traffic as possible.
The first thing to remember is that, when it comes to driving traffic, you should never put all your eggs in one basket. If you focus too much on one method and it fails, you put all your traffic at risk. It’s always best to use as many promotional methods as is feasible.
Here is our list of seven promotional techniques.

1. Get your website ranking in search engines

Search engine optimisationhas to be number one on this list, simply because it has the potential to drive the biggest volume of traffic to your site. SEO requires you to use a range of techniques to make your website more search engine friendly. These include speeding up your site; ensuring that your site is well organised and easy to navigate; using keywords in your titles, subheadings and text; and writing content that others will link to.

SEO is not an easy task and it takes time to put everything into place. It can also be a job that needs constantly updating as search engines are continually changing the goal posts. However, once your website starts ranking for your keywords, you’ll find a significant increase in the number of people who visit your site.

2. Promote your site on social media

Social media is another great way to promote your website and get people to visit. You can easily set up a business Facebook or Twitter account and create posts with links to your site. You can also use these to show images and videos of your products or services as well as offering discounts.
Social media sites are very useful for developing relationships with potential customers as you can interact with them directly. Businesses that do interact can grow their audience substantially.
If you have a highly visual business, try using Pinterest or Instagram as these are good places for posting visually stimulating content.  If you are a B2B business, you should consider setting up an account on LinkedIn.
Social media is helpful because your posts can be promoted within the community. If someone likes what you publish, they can share it with their own friends and followers, helping you reach a wider audience and get even more visitors. For more information, read our post on how to set up a Facebook business page.

3. Sign up with a business directory

We’ll start this section off with a disclaimer. Putting links to your website on some business directories can be bad for your SEO if the directory is seen as poor quality by search engines. Others, however, can be extremely helpful. If you create an account with Yell or Google My Business then you have a much greater chance of appearing in search engine results and being found when people visit the directories’ websites. Yell, for example, has nearly 18 million UK visitors a month.

Different directories are helpful for different types of business. Google My Business, for example, is particularly useful for local businesses. It also allows you to post images and show customer reviews. Yell, is useful for local and online businesses. They do offer a free account, too.

Just make sure you choose a reputable directory, preferably one which is established in your niche.  Avoid joining lots of different directories just to generate a lot of backlinks – this is what search engines don’t like.

4. Drive traffic through email

There are two ways you can use email to generate traffic. Firstly, you should make sure that every email you send has a simple website link included in your signature. This way, even non-promotional emails can be used to help people find a way to your site. People can copy and paste that link and share it with others, too.
The second way to use email is to set up an email marketing campaign. By getting your existing visitors to sign up for your emails, you can send them future marketing emails with links to specific landing pages on your website. For more information, read our post 6 Useful Email Marketing Tips for Small Business.

5. Online advertising

Online advertising, such as the pay per click services offered by Google AdWords, can be a valuable source of traffic. The advertising providers post your adverts on search engine results and on the websites of participating publishers – this helps them be seen by lots of potential customers. The technology used by these companies ensures that only relevant people see your adverts and you only pay if they click on your advert.

The downside to PPC advertising is that it can be expensive. It is so useful to businesses, that to get the best placed adverts, you may have to pay quite a lot of money for each click. You need to weigh up whether you will get enough ROI for this to be worthwhile before committing your finances. You can find that advertising on social media sites is less expensive.

6. Put your web address on paper

Your website address should be on every piece of paper you give out. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a till receipt, a flyer, a letter or any other piece of communication.

You should also create promotional material specially designed to get people to visit your site. For example, quite a lot of eBay sellers put little cards in their packaging with links to their website. They also include a discount code to incentivise visits. These methods are a great way to generate new and repeat business.

7. Put your web address on display

There are numerous ways to get your website address seen by lots of people. You can try any of the following if you find them appropriate for your business: t-shirts, car and van door stickers, shop window stickers, balloons, back of bus adverts, plastic and paper bag printing, keyrings, pens and pencils, shop signs, mugs… the list is enormous.

You shouldn’t underestimate the potential that these methods have for generating traffic – they enable your website address to be seen by lots of people and are great for reminding people that your business is there.

Conclusion

This post has covered a range of ways for new websites to promote themselves. Methods, such as search engine optimisation and social media are vital for online success and should be used by every business; other methods are optional and using them depends on the type of business you are. However, to succeed, especially in the early days of your business, you need to attract attention in as many ways as possible. Hopefully, this post will have given you a few valuable ideas.

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