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What are the best ways to market your website online?
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6 Answers
There is no one good answer to this question without understanding who your audience is and what your goals are when they arrive at your site. If you are hoping to convert people into clients for a B2B business, then your approach would be different than if you are a B2C site selling products.
Search Engine Optimization is certainly a must, but there is a plethora of ways to do this. We generally recommend clients combine Search Engine Optimization with Social Media efforts, because then you get two for one for the time you spend. In addition, utilizing Social Media will build your online reputation, and your online reputation is a valuable asset to bring in more site visitors.
In a super basic nutshell, these are organic ways I would recommend to market your website:
1) Set weekly goals to obtain in-bound links. 50-100 per week is a good number. List yourself in business directories, comment on blogs and send out press releases to help achieve your weekly goals. SEO optimization is highly reliant on in-bound link numbers, but quality of where the links come from is important too.
2) Check all your social media profiles. Make sure they are up-to-date and you have taken advantage of all opportunities to link to your website. For example, on LinkedIn make sure your have pulled in your blog (if you have one) and Twitter. Also, create a company page on LinkedIn where they now let you list services you offer.
3) Create a blog that is HELPFUL. Not a blog that is all about how great your company is, but has genuinely helpful information that people will return to over and over. Host your blog on a separate server from your website so you can use it to build your in-bound links.
4) Choose 2-3 social networks to participate in. Choose ones that you are interested in, and set weekly goals for time/posts/comments, etc. Remember that social media is about mutual interaction, so don't be all about promoting you. Promote and share other people's content, and they will promote and share yours. A message board that is industry-specific is an excellent way to share what you do plus gain some of those SEO links. Note that you want any message board to have public posts. If you have to login to see posts, the search engines can't index them.
5) Make sure your website is optimized. Check your analytics for your bounce rate. Do people leave your site quickly after they arrive? If so, why aren't they staying? You can do a lot to draw traffic, but if they come and leave quickly, you've wasted all your efforts.
PPC campaigns can be really valuable as well, but we have seen many clients who spent thousands of dollars with little return. The PPC campaign is a lot about keywords, and if you don't research them properly, you won't get the clicks. Also, if your website is not optimized, you've wasted a lot of money.
This is a big question and I've tried to give you a really short Reader's Digest answer here. Here's a blog post I wrote that might give some more ideas: http://www.simplewebtoolbox.com/15-ways-to-promote-your-website-on-a-tight-bu...
True, if all you want is traffic.
SEO will target a keyword, but who says you know what that keyword wants?
You have to ask them.
Make sure you have done your research.
Nobody says this : survey your market before optimizing for keywords.
Otherwise, you are guessing.
When you survey each keyword, you discover the conversations that are going on
in your prospects head.
Do you want your website to be a traffic generating machine or a fancy brochure?
Your website is an expression of your target market's frustrations and your solution.
If all you want is random traffic and lots of it, then SEO is slow and effective.
PPC is fast and trackable.
There are so many resources online for this question it can make your head spin.
Suggested resources: Survey Gizmo, SEOBook.com, Perry Marshall.com (PPC)
(Understand traffic is useless if you don't understand how to convert it to customers. Just by getting your website out there with lots of traffic, is not enough)
Search engine optimization. It offers long-term, highly targeted visitors.
Tom brings up great points. And it all points to your audience. A manufacturing company website has a different audience than a clothing retailer, which has a different audience than a motorcycle racing news page. Yes, SEO is important, but you can't simply expert your site and keywords to pull in viewers. You need to reach out, whether using social media tools, or an e-mail newsletter, or traditional advertising and marketing.
You need to generate conversations about the content and information that might be on your site. Lots of ways to do it, but no single best way for every site.
Great answer Bonnie, Glenn and Rebecca.
One more 2-min nugget:
It is important to distinguish between marketing principles vs. marketing techniques.
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The principals include:
1) understanding target market's pain
2) How are you different? ie your Unique Selling Proposition
3) How much does it cost you to acquire a lead and what is the lifetime value of a customer. (therefore, how much can you spend on marketing to acquire a lead)
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The techniques include:
1) Traffic- SEO, PPC, Banner ads, trade journals, radio, newspaper, Facebook etc.
2) Conversion - lead capture pages, email & phone follow ups, lead nurturing
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Most marketing companies and people focus on techniques. They think that by going through the motions of generating traffic targeted towards a popular keyword(s), that will be the answer to their lead generation problems.
Beware of people who only preach technique. They are the majority.
All of your techniques are expressed through the fundamental marketing principals which have always been the same for 100 years. Human emotions don't change, just technology.
There should never be a reason to "waste money" on PPC and SEO, only later to find out it didn't work. With research, you can find each keyword represents a different conversation inside your prospects head and which ones are responsive enough to be paying customers. Don't optimize on keywords you THINK are the best.
The reason PPC gets so expensive is because most people pick keywords on pure intuition and enter into expensive markets. They do no preliminary research and don't rely understand how much they can afford to spend per lead to make their business profitable.
The original question is a loaded one. I see so many people paying through the nose for SEO techniques, when they don't even have their marketing fundmentals down.
I hope I can save you some unnecessary heartache. Don't just throw your stuff out at your target market.
First survey if they are a responsive market, then mirror back their pains to them in all of your marketing techniques.
Hope this helps. I appreciate all feedback.
google this : 'Scientific Advertising" by Claude Hopkins. It was written in the early 1900's and still holds true today.
Bonnie and Jordan really did a great job with this question I just have a few points to add.
Create at least 5 methods to capture visitor contact information on your website. Give away a special report, white paper, have an e-newsletter sign up, give away a free chapter download of your book or e-book, ask them to sign up for the RSS feed of your blog. Use a pop-up window within 6 seconds of arrival at your site too. They are not a favorite of readers, but they convert.
For professional service businesses its all about blogging. You must blog 2-3 times a week to be taken seriously. The more the better.
Pick two social media marketing sites to build community and push out your blog content. Use a 4:1 ratio of promoting other people's content over your own.
If you have an existing website invest in having your google analytics reviewed by a professional so that you can tweak your content strategy. Once your figure out what your audience likes, give them more over it.
Keywords are important particularly regarding the title of your blog posts.
SEO is a must and there are plugins that will do this for your blog or website if you are using a wordpress platform site.
Within 60 days of a post use article marketing sites to repurpose your content to create inbound links. Be sure to rewrite at least the first paragraph of the post so that the search engines do not suspect duplicate content.
Melinda Emerson
@SmallBizLady
http://www.succeedasyourownboss.com
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