Customers or readers will not fall from the sky. If you have decided to create your own website, whether personal, corporate or commercial, you should know that to attract visitors and start selling your services or products you will need to invest, mainly time, but also, depending on the goals you want to achieve, we speak of a financial investment.
Once you make your site available to the world, it is very likely that you will have to take steps to promote it. You can invite your friends and family members to visit your site, to help you promote your products, sharing them on their social networks, but you can’t expect them to do the whole job for you.
Today, we would like to give you a number of tips to promote your site, with suggestions for all kinds of budgets, from zero cost to sponsorship at large events.
However, remember that originality and innovation are fundamental, so don’t forget to think about these two factors when creating a strategy for promoting your site.
· SEO: positioning your site
The best way to promote your new page is to try to improve its ranking on Google and other search engines. Select your keywords well so that when a user search for these terms in any search engine (mainly Google), your site will be on the first page of the results.
According to different studies, the first page of Google results is responsible for generating 92% of organic search traffic. The main problem is that for a user to access the second page on Google, he must be very dissatisfied with the first results, or very desperate for additional information.
To do that, as we said, you should work with the correct keywords, that is, the list of words that you want to rank, which must be related to your site. These words should be in your texts, categories, product descriptions, or promotional pages. However, they should be used coherently, otherwise it will not work. If you just write keywords randomly, Google will see that you are trying to bend the rules and you will never get the results you are hoping for.
To help you, we recommend working with two tools. The first one is Google Trends, which allows you to compare the searches of a word with other keywords. That information is very useful when you need to work with synonyms, for example, to know what are the best keywords to use in your texts. The second tool is called Keyword Planner, created for Google Adwords. Through it, you will be able to see what are the best keywords for you to use, but it will also be possible to know which ones your competitors are trying to rank.
· SEM: online advertising
SEO is a good option through which you will get many visits to your site if you use the correct digital marketing strategy, but you will begin to get results in the medium and long term.
Maybe, if you just opened your website, you already made an investment in page development and design, which means that you would like to make profits in a short time . For that, you will need to have patience and invest a little more money in online advertising.
You can contact other webmasters to pay for advertising space on other websites related to your niche, to place your banner or ads and try to get new leads. You could also use advertising channels like Google Adwords Google Adwords.
The budget required to work with ads will vary greatly, since it will be determined by the administrators of the sites where you want to buy a paid ad. If you choose to work with Google Adwords, that program works through a system of bids and you can make an estimate of how much it would cost to advertise through the Google Adwords Keyword Planner.
Would it be worth it? If you follow the correct strategy, that could be quite profitable and you would have conversions from the first day. On the other hand, if you don’t plan your advertising campaigns correctly, you could attract visitors (paid from your pocket) but users who will not buy from you. You should also take into consideration the existence of advertising blockers, such as AdBlocker, which is one of the best known systems. These extensions prevent your banner, inserted in another site, from being viewed by the user, so your strategy wouldn’t be effective.
As we have explained several times, social networks could become a key tool for your presence in the digital world. Remember that you should not create profiles on all of them, but on the platforms where your audience is present. For example, if your products are for consumers between 15 and 20 years, you will not reach them through LinkedIn, but rather using Instagram or Snapchat.
Once you have a page or profile on social networks, remember to ask all your friends to follow you. Also, don’t forget to update it continuously, not only with your products, but with content of interest for your audience. A great way to create relevant content is to start writting articles for a corporate blog.
The revolution of social networks in the relationship between brands and customers is in constant growth. We went from na unidirectional model (the company speaks, the customer listens and decides whether to trust on the brand or not), for a bidirectional model where customers can ask questions, read the opinion from other customers and even criticize you.
Therefore, you should always be interacting with your audience, through a “customer support” service. If someone writes you with a question, try to help as best as you can. Or if a user compliments your brand, always respond, thanking the user for his opinion.
Remember that being present on social networks also means being exposed for negative comments. You should decide from the beginning what you are going to do if you receive a negative opinion or comment. As a general rule, for transparency, it is not advisable to delete these comments, although there are brands and companies that continue to do so. What you should never do, is to omit those comments.
Finally, measuring the strategy you are following is essential to know if you are succeeding or, conversely, if you are just wasting your time. With the metrics provided by the platforms you are using, and even Google Analytics, you can understand the behavior of your visitors, where they are coming from, which are the most visited pages, the most shared pages as well as the bounce rate.
Don’t worry! If you do things correctly, with time you are going to start seing results. Metrics may be great at first because of the novelty, but in four months they could fall precipitously, so you must take into consideration the time factor to know if your strategy is working or not.
How about joining the two previous points? It’s another possibility for success. For that, the first step is to have an attractive product or service, investigate and understand the market well and start advertising with direct and different messages, always according to your target audience.
Of course, the formula for success is not so easy. You should know that creating advertising campaigns on social networks is a challenging task and requires a lot of work, not only in terms of creativity, but also in the knowledge of the platforms you are using. Working correctly with ads on social networks, you can generate conversions, but you will also get followers and visits. With targeting, you can even save on your budget.
· Create your own blog
Keep in mind, first of all, that this will be a medium and long-term strategy. don’t expect to receive thousands of visits and/or purchases with the first article you publish on your blog. However, if your blog offers specialized content, that is relevant to your visitors, your business will start growing.
In it you can show your products, news or information related to your sector. As we said earlier, that content could also be published on social networks, directing traffic to your website. If within the same blog post you include internal links to your products, you can make the purchasing process much faster and easier.
Of course, that option will also help you improve your SEO strategy and the ranking of your website. Do your best to provide users with relevant contente and don’t forget to use the keywords you trying to position, because this way you will also be working indirectly to get to the first page of search engines, which will allow you to get new visitors.
· Email marketing
Email marketing is a great way to promote your site, its products and content.
It’s a way to show what you’re doing, working with contacts that already were interested in your site, and to get new contacts with the traffic generated by your digital marketing strategy.
In fact, we have seen many of the benefits of email marketing in other articles.
I recommend that you check them to understand how email marketing can contribute to your business.
· What is free always helps
Let’s not fool ourselves, we’ve all followed a Facebook page or did something to participate in a contest, draw or to win a prise. All to get something for free!
If you want to attract new followers quickly, one of the best alternatives would be to offer one of your products or your services for free to a few customers.
That is the best strategy to help you reach your goal in the short term. For this you can use contests or sweepstakes.
Do you want tips? Imagine making an initial draw only among your followers. They might have to share a link (if it is one of the requirements to participate) and this way other users could get to know your work. But for sure if you create some free promotion, even temporarily along with a small advertising campaign on social networks, the results would improve exponentially.
However, be very careful! Contests, sweepstakes or free versions could turn against you, acting like a double-edged sword.
After offering the promotion, you will have to work on on your digital marketing strategy, so that your new followers can become customers. After the promotion ends, you will have a new challenge:
You will have to persuade users to continue using your services, (by paying).
· And in the offline world?
Not everything is available on the screen of your mobile device or your computer! Perhaps you can afford to promote your business through the more traditional channels. We are talking, of course, about advertising on television, radio, press, etc. But if you don’t have the money for that, you could also use cheaper techniques.
You could also get free advertising in newspapers, magazines from your sector or other websites. To do that, you should not sell your business or your brand, but your history. Think about your idea, product or service, to create empathy, with values like commitment, solidarity, effort, etc. If you offer interesting content, some media may agree to post it and share the content with your community as it is not commercial.
Another idea to promote your website (depending on your budget) would be through the collaboration or sponsorship of events. Always think that you should sponsor events related to your business, with the same values so you can attract people interested in your site. For example, if your audience is made up of users between 20 and 35 years old, sponsoring a summer festival might be a good idea.
To conclude, we speak again about originality and creativity. Maybe you think it would be very old-fashioned to start handing out leaflets. However, why not create fan-shaped flyers to help ward off the heat? Your creativity will be the decisive factor in the success of your promotion.
