Congrats, you have a website! Next, you want to build your audience and market your website more.
Chances are if you’re wondering how to promote your website and you’re still in the early stages of your business, you’re worried that the only effective way to drive traffic might be to spend a fortune on ad space. Promoting your site doesn’t have to cost you a fortune. In some cases, it doesn’t have to cost anything at all.
Thankfully, there are a lot of marketing courses out there that can teach you how to promote your website in a variety of ways, organically.
At the end of the day, it all depends on how much time you’re looking to spend and put into the promotion of your site. Here we will discuss 10 ways you can effectively market your website today and start making money.
1. Understand your site’s SEO
SEO is a fantastic starting point when taking a holistic view of your website. While it’s not the end all be all, SEO is too big to ignore completely. Good thing is, you have the option to do it completely free.
Tools and plugins like Rank Math and Yoast do a good job of giving you a baseline of basic SEO. They allow you to add meta titles, descriptions and structure your data, helping with indexing and targeting keywords.
Next, you can go to Google Search Console so you can understand what keywords and content are ranking for your site.
A large publisher told me that if you focus on producing quality, genuine content that your SEO and rankings will follow. Learn more about how to avoid SEO pitfalls here.
2. Look at email marketing
A tried and true method to drive traffic and promote a website is using email marketing. You probably have already set up a great call to action (CTA) on your site where you collect prospect data.
Once you have built an email list, avenues like newsletters work well in gaining new interest to your site and content as well as engaging with an audience you may already have.
To create an engaging newsletter, keep your content punchy and direct, and use prominent calls-to-action that encourage readers to click. That will help your content stand out from the sea of other newsletters your subscribers may receive.
Also, understand your audience base and cater your content accordingly. Let’s say you have a site all about pets – you have information available that tells you that some customers specifically enjoy cat content, while others prefer dog content. With email marketing, you can segment those audiences and deliver content that appeals to them.
The more relevant and useful the content is, the more likely those users are to engage with your content and give you more traffic to your site.
3. Start your blog
If your site doesn’t already have a blog section, consider adding one as a creative outlet for yourself, as well as an opportunity to show your audience more of your personality or provide more info about the subject matter on your site.
A blog is valuable to your audience because it forces you to research your space more and also helps your overall site SEO at the same time. Being a trustworthy source is critical and helps you gain traction over time.
As you build out your blog, be sure to include images, videos and other graphics to make your content as engaging as possible for your audience. You can also start to include blog categories to make it easy for your readers to quickly browse topics and stories on your blog page.
4. Take advantage of guest blogging
Once you’ve built up your own blog and gotten the hang of your process, reach out to other site owners in your market or even adjacent. Sharing different perspectives not only can get you more exposure but also brings SEO benefits when you’re linked on another site.
Cross-promotion is an easy way to get new visitors and eyes on your content. Also, welcome the idea of others writing guest blogs on your site.
5. Post on social media
Social media has become one of the easiest and most effective ways to weaponize an audience you already have.
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are some of the best places to post and engage with your followers. To start, try making a new page outside of your personal account that’s dedicated to your site. Then you can start plugging it from your personal account and gauge how your current followers respond to it.
Use tools like Canva to make graphics and banners for free that you can post on your social media pages.
6. Use online directories
If you have a business and are interested in driving more traffic to your site, then places like Google My Business is a must.
Creating a Google My Business profile is free, easy, and makes your business easier to find when people make location-based searches. With a Business profile, you can attach your new website to other information about your business like opening hours, contact details, and your location, making it easy for customers to find your business among the search engine results.
One of the great things about Google My Business is that you can see how users are interacting with your business profile, so you can easily change your promotion strategy if you find out it’s not driving as much traffic as you hoped for.
7. Post on forums
A form of social media by definition, but with different qualities is forums.
A good starting point would be to simply search for keywords in your industry plus “forum”. You may be shocked by all the people who want to talk or have questions about your space no matter how niche it is.
Places like Reddit have an infinite amount of “subreddits”, or forums dedicated to certain topics. You can start a new thread or discussion or jump into comments to organically promote your page.
Be sure to read any rules set forward by the forum in regards to posting links or self-promotion as you wouldn’t want to get banned.
8. Collab with outreach
In the same way that you may coordinate guest blogging, try connecting with influencers in your niche and see if there’s any direct deal you can benefit both parties.
Make a goal and find people who you think would help you achieve it. It could be as little as getting a backlink or as large as creating a partnership. You’ll have to sell yourself, so try sending a pitch to your prospective colleague over a social media platform.
At the very least you’ll be able to build relationships through outreach and have your contact info in someone else’s address book. We’ve seen many instances when an opportunity arises down the road all because of an introduction in the past.
9. Show off your expertise
You’ve seen rich snippets and answers to your questions dominate Google search results.
One of the bigger platforms that frequently shows up in search is Quora. This website allows users to post questions for the community to answer.
If you use Quora well, it’s a great promotional tool to promote your website and showcase your expertise, and can be a great distribution tool for your content marketing strategy.
All you have to do is sign up for an account and start answering questions relating to your industry or niche while remembering to link back to your website at some point in your answer. This could be linking to a blog post where you’ve already answered someone’s question or linking to your “about” page to show other users what qualifications you have.
Medium is another great place to show off your expertise and attract interested readers to your content. Follow other writers in your niche and even offer to content share once you have built more of a following – a win-win for each party.
10. Focus on quality
As we alluded to earlier, your goal above all should be to produce quality content on your site. If you do this, most other things will fall in line.
Too many times we’ve seen sites focus on the wrong things and then wonder why they fall on search rankings or ad revenue when the latest Google core update hits them.
So for each piece of content you create, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and try to understand the benefits they get from reading your blog posts. In other words, what’s in it for them?
Go forward and market your website!
As with everything, go with your gut and what works the best for you. You may find a certain combination of your efforts pays the most dividends. Driving a new audience through your marketing funnel is the ultimate goal but it’s important to stay authentic throughout the process.
We’d love to know what’s been effective for you when marketing your website. If you think we left anything off or have anything else to add, chime in and write us a comment!
