Market Your Website

Launching a new website, or want to drive some traffic to your existing site? Marketing your site is a crucial part of increasing your viewership, and advertising takes many forms. From optimizing your site to increasing awareness, advertising your site is crucial for becoming successful online.

Steps

Optimizing Your Site

  1. Optimize your content for search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important factor for improving your site's visibility. It involves ensuring that the content on your site matches potential search terms. Common SEO targets are article and page titles, image descriptions, URLs, and natural keyword use in content.[1]
    • There's a whole to say about proper search engine optimization. Check out Improve-Search-Engine-Optimization for detailed tips for optimizing your content.
  2. Build back links. Back links are links to your site from other sites. For the most effective back links, you want links from sites that are much more popular than your own site.[2]
    • Commenting on other blogs, posting in forums, answering questions, and guest blogging are just some of the ways that you can increase the number of links. See Start Link Building for Your Website for an in-depth discussion on how to best build back links.
  3. Ensure your design is up to date. A good-looking and functional website will attract and retain a lot more viewers than an outdated and difficult to use site.
  4. Check that your site's structure is easy to crawl. If search engines have difficulty moving through your site, they won't be able to catalog your content. Run your site through a crawl test to ensure that it is easily crawlable.[3]
    • Some of the more popular crawling simulators include Xenu and GSiteCrawler. These simulators will help reveal any issues with the navigation and structure of your site.

Spreading the Word

  1. Create a Twitter account. Twitter allows you to post whenever you release new content. Twitter is one of the most important new tools for keeping readers informed. Post your headline and a Shorten-a-URL to the article for each new post on your site.
  2. Post your new content on social media sites. Social media is where your readers spend the majority of their time while online. Make sure that all of your content is getting pushed to your related social media pages.
    • Create Create-a-Facebook-Page and Use-Google+ pages. This will let you easily share your new content with anyone that is a fan of your page.
    • Links from social media sites generally do not help your page ranking, but they do help build viewers. This will eventually lead to a higher page rank as viewers start linking to your site on their own.
  3. Create-an-RSS-Feed. RSS feeds allow readers to add your site to their reader, which will update them whenever you publish new content. You can also submit your RSS feed to directories to help draw in new viewers.
  4. Make-a-YouTube-Video. YouTube is an incredibly popular site, and if your content lends itself to videos (How-To, reviews, etc.), you should consider creating a YouTube channel. Create and upload videos that enhance your content, and include links to your site in the video's description and annotations.
  5. Do-Email-Marketing. Create a newsletter that you can send out to a mailing list of your viewers. If you have an account creation system, have new users automatically opted in to your mailing list.[4]
  6. Send out press releases. Press releases let others know about new developments on your site, and allow other websites to easily share this news with their readers. Write press releases for your website's launch and Submit-a-Press-Release to relevant outlets.
  7. Submit your content to directories and aggregate sites. Add-Websites-to-StumbleUpon, Submit-an-Article-to-Digg, Reddit, Submit-a-Story-to-Slashdot, and others are a great way to get your articles in front of more potential viewers. Like social network sites, they often won't have a large impact on your ranking right away, but they will eventually lead to more traffic for your site.
  8. Advertise-Online. If you have the money to spend, consider purchasing some ad space. You'll need a good design for your ad, as well as a good target for the campaign. Ads can reach a lot of people, and can result in a big increase in traffic.

Producing Quality Content

  1. Become-an-Expert. Your goal should be making your site the premier destination for your type of content on the internet. This means that you need to become an expert about your niche or interest, so that you can convey that expertise to your readers.
  2. Produce unique content. The best way to drive traffic to your site is by providing unique and useful content that cannot be found elsewhere on the internet (except when it's been stolen from you by someone else). Producing unique content and becoming an expert go hand in hand. try to approach your content from an angle that hasn't been tried before.
  3. Release content regularly. A regular update schedule will help you retain users. The average viewer's attention span is incredibly short, and their memory is even shorter. You need to be consistently producing new content so that viewers continue to come back for more.
    • If you're writing a blog, try to update at least a couple times every week.
    • Try to time the release of your content during the prime time for your main audience. This usually means lunch hour or after regular dinner time. This will help ensure that the most people possible see your content.
  4. Write attention-grabbing headlines. The headline and the associated image for an article is usually the first thing a viewer will see, and if it's not interesting they'll likely skip past without a second thought. Sites like BuzzFeed get high traffic due to their unique and gripping headlines.
  5. Write-Social-Media-Content. In the world of social media, you want to ensure that your content makes for a good share. This is the whole package: the headline, the image, and the promise of unique content inside. All of these will help drive people to share your content with their friends.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ilyapozin/2012/04/11/10-proven-ways-to-market-your-website/
  2. ↑ https://creativemarket.com/blog/2013/07/03/10-tips-for-driving-traffic-to-your-website-part-1
  3. ↑ http://moz.com/blog/launching-a-new-website-18-steps
  4. ↑ http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/08/13/how-to-market-your-company-for-free/
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