One of the chief mistakes that many people new to the idea of marketing online make is to assume that online marketing is entirely different from traditional marketing. After all, people figure, if the Internet is so new, shouldn’t it be easy to stake your claim in Internet real estate and rake in the big bucks?
Unfortunately, like so many people who headed west during the gold rush, not everyone is going to strike it big. The truth is that websites need to follow the same principles that make for good business in the offline world. But there are ways to promote your site with Internet-specific strategies. So if you’ve been struggling with your own traffic, you’ll want to pay attention to the following. Trust us: taking these tips to heart will make for a more valuable and profitable web presence.
1. Search Engine Optimization.
One of the most popular ways to promote your site is actually not to promote it at all, but rather to let the search engines do the promotion for you. Of course, that’s not usually the way things work out as SEO can be tough work. But having a basic knowledge of SEO can really help your site to place highly in engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing because your site is easy for the search engine bots to “read.” Will this solve all of your problems? No of course not. But it will remove a lot of obstacles to achieving success.
2. Create unique or interesting content.
No matter what kind of site you have – a blog, a podcast, an online shop – it’s important that you provide something of value to readers. No one’s going to click onto your site unless they think they can get something interesting out of it. You don’t always have to have a blog and write strong articles; many times your site just needs to have an interesting take on things in order to attract an audience.
3. Find ways to be mentioned on other sites.
Sometimes it helps simply to be mentioned on a high-traffic site, a form of free advertising. Writing a guest post on someone else’s blog can be a great start, particularly if that blog carries a lot of visitors. If you can get front-page attention on other sites, from news outlets to high-traffic social media sites like Digg or Reddit, you’ll stand a far better chance of standing out from the crowd. It’s important to focus your attention on the high-traffic sites so that when you finally create a hit, you hit it big.
4. Pay for advertising.
Generally if you’re unable to drum up traffic for free, you won’t be able to get a lot out of your advertising. Why not? Because if your website isn’t strong enough to stand on its own, no amount of paid advertising will magically “fix” everything. But you can pay for advertising if you know you have a strong site that people actually use or purchase from. Pay-Per-Click advertising and sponsorships are good options to consider.
5. Network in person.
Sometimes there’s no substitute for a good old-fashioned in-person meeting to solidify your connection with an audience. If you can network with people about your site and get them interested enough in what you do to share your site with their friends, then there’s a good chance that you’re on the right track. One word of warning: shameless self-promotion in person can turn a lot of people off. Make sure you always treat people as people and not as avenues for site promotion. Can’t they be both?
There is, of course, a lot more to the story of self-promotion than we can fit here. Many people have researched countless ways to promote their site and found what works for them.
Sometimes, your site simply won’t resonate with an audience the way you’d hoped to. In these cases, it can be just as important to cut your losses as it is to learn about site promotion. If you’re interested in selling your web site and “getting out” in order to focus on a new idea that you think might perform better, then continue to explore WebsiteBroker.com and find out how you can list your site for sale.
There are plenty of sites listed for sale already if you want to buy an already-established domain name, and remember – just because you didn’t make it with one site doesn’t mean you can’t use what you learned to improve your next online venture.
