The internet world today is a very crowded place with a lot of competition in the mix. If you build a website for personal or business use, you’d be pretty lucky to become ahead of the pack without any effort in marketing and promoting your brand.
Business owners are still under the impression that by designing and building a flashy website and listing it on the web, the enquiries will start to flow in. This may happen sometimes in a less crowded niche but in most cases you’d need some promoting strategies for your website to hit the big time.
There is no single website that gets a respectable place on search results and considerable amount of traffic in one day. Even the authoritative websites of today must have started nowhere near the top. If they could, they would use as little financial resource as possible to get enough traffic and build their way to popularity. Some people spend a lot of money to attract more traffic to their websites either through ads or new design, but there are still budget-friendly ways to get the same results as follows.
Email Marketing
This method has been used by both casual bloggers and even professional websites since the dawn of Internet, and it is still effective today. In fact, it is one of the easiest and affordable ways to attract more people to your website.
Instead of bombarding people with relentless messages filled with nothing but links, you should pay attention to the contents for this method to work. Provide people with compelling reasons to subscribe for example informative/relevant content, interesting offers (coupons, contests, or discounts), upcoming local events etc. Every recipient is one-click away from unsubscribing, so keep the engaged by providing information about new products, explainer videos, e-book, or anything else that you can give away for free.
Social Marketing
According to a study by Nielsen, people are 68% more likely to remember ads when they see it with social context. When the ads are associated with “likes”, people are twice as likely to remember the content as well. You have a lot of platforms to launch social marketing campaigns:
• Facebook: it has more than 1,4 billion of registered users
• Instagram: monthly active users has now reached more than 500 million people
• YouTube: with 900 million unique visits every month
• Twitter: with 2.1 billion Twitter search queries everyday
Of course, there are more social media websites you can use such as Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, and more.
Local SEO
When it comes to SEO marketing, most people think of a keyword and its placement in the content. While that is not entirely incorrect, there are more factors involved in SEO for examples inbound links, website design and navigation, contents relevancy, and the use of images or videos. It can take weeks (if not months) of works for any SEO implementation to give noticeable results, but this is the foundation to get more traffic.
Content Marketing
SEO and content marketing are inseparable. By “content marketing”, you offer valuable contents in form of articles, images, podcasts, or videos to promote your website. To do that, the contents must be original, interesting, and based on SEO principals. Writing a post for other authoritative blogs in your niche can be beneficial as well; just remember to put a link to your own blog/website at the end of the content.
Directory Website Listing
Local business directories are crawled by major search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to provide relevant information for local search queries. For your business/website to appear in search suggestion, you must list your brands to the directories. Make sure you put accurate information about address and contact information. Some local directories you can try are Yelp, True Local, and StartLocal.