“If you build it, they will come”—the famous Field of Dreams mantra works for business owners too.
On the one hand, it suggests creating something that provides real value to your target audience—good advice for any entrepreneur. On the other, it disregards the work of helping your audience find you—a critical business activity in ecommerce. While people might conceivably wander by a new baseball field or brick-and-mortar store, they’re unlikely to encounter a new website by chance.
Set yourself up for success by building a high-quality online store and then implementing an ongoing website promotion strategy. This helps your desired audience find your website, while also building brand awareness, increasing customer loyalty, and boosting profits.
Continue reading to discover a combination of traditional and digital marketing strategies to help you start promoting your website.
11 ways to promote your website
- Optimize your site for search
- Start a blog
- Use social content
- Utilize a keyword research tool
- Develop a guest posting strategy
- Join business directories
- Start an email marketing newsletter
- Pay for promotion
- Offer educational content
- Network at events
- Leverage your data
A website is only as valuable as its visitors, but you don’t necessarily need to spend money to effectively promote your site. Here are 11 digital and traditional marketing methods to help you earnmore traffic (and more revenue):
1. Optimize your site for search
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engine results. Online businesses use SEO to earn more website traffic and increase the relevance of the organic traffic to their sites. Here’s an overview of the three main types:
On-page SEO
On-page SEO involves creating high-quality content that matches the search intent of people in your target audiences. It also includes optimizing images and internal links and strategically incorporating relevant keywords into website content and metadata.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO boosts your site’s domain authority—a measurement of the domain’s credibility and potential to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Off-page SEO can include guest blogging, posting to social media sites, executing public relations initiatives, and pursuing other backlink-building strategies.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on your page speed, site structure, and search engine indexing. It can boost your search engine rankings, improve your user experience, and help your product pages show up in Google Shopping or other relevant search engine results.
2. Start a blog
Blogging is a popular on-page SEO strategy. Create compelling content corresponding to seasonal search trends, and incorporate keywords relevant to the topic at hand. For example, a company selling decorative gift wrap and ribbons might publish a blog about creating the perfect gift bag for wedding guests or hosting a holiday gift swap.
Many websites also use blog content for content marketing, a strategy by which a business creates and publishes free resources to deliver value to target audiences. That way, it can build trust and authority with its customer base.
Content marketing blog posts typically focus on educational, entertaining, or informative content. A pet gear company might publish a guide to house-training a new puppy, for example, and an organic cleaning products provider might provide a list of suggestions for dealing with indoor allergies.
🌟Looking for inspiration? Here are 15 standout blogs run by ecommerce stores and ideas you can adapt for your own content marketing strategy.
3. Use social content
Social media marketing can raise awareness for your brand and drive traffic to your site. To maximize your results, choose a social media platform that’s popular with your target audiences, research engagement patterns and high-performing content types, and include a website link with each post. Use social platform data or a dedicated social media analytics tool to monitor your content’s performance and optimize your strategy.
4. Utilize a keyword research tool
A keyword research tool can help you find keywords important to your target audiences and identify the best ones for your website’s SEO strategy. Typically, you enter a seed keyword, and the tool generates a list of suggested keywords related to your prompt. Some tools also show popular search queries related to seed keywords or provide insights into your competitors’ keyword strategy.
You can use the research tool’s suggested keywords to plan your upcoming content, or to make your existing content more SEO-friendly. Incorporate the seed keyword (which reflects the focus of your blog post) and the recommended additional keywords throughout your content, paying special attention to the title and section headers.
Keyword research tools can also help you evaluate keyword difficulty when you’re choosing keywords for your web pages and blog content. Best practices for optimizing a new website include focusing on easy keywords to increase the site’s chances of appearing on the first SERP, and working on more difficult keywords only after you’ve strengthened your domain authority.
5. Develop a guest posting strategy
Guest posting refers to posting content on other websites’ blogs (or allowing other businesses to guest post on your blog) to cross-promote your site to different or expanded audiences.
Request a backlink in exchange for providing guest blog content, and require guest posters to link from their site to your blog. This strategy can be particularly valuable for new websites. Cross-promotion with an established name in your field is a quick way to boost your traffic, and high-quality backlinks can increase your domain authority and improve your performance in search results.
6. Join business directories
If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a Google Business Profile. Include your brand’s contact details and a link that directs users to your site. You can also enroll inother search engine directories (like Bing My Business and Yahoo Business Listings). Don’t forget local directories, including online directories for your community and local business listings in phone books or print publications.
7. Start an email marketing newsletter
An email marketing newsletter can keep you top of mind with current customers, help you earn new referrals, and increase clicks to your website. Use your website and social platforms to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter.
Meanwhile,create content for the newsletter that provides value to your target audience. Consider rewarding new subscribers with a discount code, free gift, or other incentive, and encourage them to share your content with their own networks.
8. Pay for promotion
Paid strategies can help you attract more visitors to your site. Advertise on social media sites, place ads through an advertising platform like Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), or purchase ad space directly from websites or printed publications.
Influencer marketing is another effective form of paid website promotion. You might send products to influencers (at no cost to them) with the hope of earning a mention on their blogs. You could pay influencers to perform specific actions, such as mentioning your products on their social media accounts or publishing product reviews.
9. Offer educational content
Publishing educational articles, white papers, or online courses as part of your content marketing efforts can also attract potential customers to your site. This strategy is particularly effective for businesses whose ideal customers have specific educational needs—especially if those needs signal an intent to make a purchase.
If you sell a wearable fitness tracker for endurance athletes, for example, you might publish a series of articles about training for different distance events. You would gear these toward people who are just getting into endurance athletics. By attracting site visitors who are newly interested in a subject, you’ll garner followers who are unlikely to already own a product like yours but are likely to be in the market for one in the near future.
10. Network at events
Attending trade shows and community events can generate interest in your company and allow you to network with potential customers and other professionals.
To maximize your exposure, develop printed collateral or promotional items and include a QR code that directs traffic to your website. Go one step further by creating and distributing promotional items that would-be customers are likely to engage with. For example, hand out branded shade umbrellas at your town’s Fourth of July parade or foam footballs at a local sporting event. Just make sure the promotional item is relevant to your brand.
Consider hosting your own event, which allows you to design a gathering around your target audience’s interests. Community events can even generate press coverage for your brand. An organic pet treat company, for example, might host a community dog show with attention-grabbing categories like “best smile,” “best hairstyle,” and “cutest couple.”
11. Leverage your data
Google Analytics (or your website analytics tool of choice) can provide insight into how audiences are finding and interacting with your site. Many analytics tools display traffic volumes and click-through rates by channel and by individual piece of content—this helps you identify effective tactics so you can do more of what works. If you notice a large volume of your traffic comes from Instagram ads, for example, you might decide to invest more in that strategy.
How to promote your website FAQ
How do you get your website noticed for free?
Here are five free or low-cost website promotion strategies:
- Start a blog
- Optimize your existing content for search
- Join online business directories
- Guest post on other brands’ blogs
- Promote your business at events
How can I attract people to my website?
These six tips can help you boost site traffic:
- Invest in search engine optimization (SEO) strategy
- Promote your business at community events
- Start an email marketing newsletter
- Develop a social media marketing strategy
- Pay for advertising
- Try influencer marketing
Why is it important to promote my website?
Promoting your website increases its visibility to online shoppers, which increases your potential for revenue. Think of it like improving the physical location of a brick-and-mortar store: Skipping website promotion is like setting up shop in the Alaskan interior and waiting for foot traffic, while implementing an effective promotion strategy is like renting a boutique space in a busy pedestrian district.
