Marketing your website is crucial to online success. You can have the most beautiful website in the world, along with content that really helps people -- which is the purpose of the website, right? -- but if no one knows about it, what good does it do?
If you want a membership website - or any kind of website - to accomplish your goal of making life better for people who see it, you have to market it. In fact, some experts say you need to spend more time marketing your site than anything else in your business. So here are 11 great ideas for website marketing that you can start implementing right away.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is constantly evolving as search engines refine their algorithms. It is initially laborious and can be dull, but often, and given enough time, you will see the greatest return on your investment by applying SEO strategies well. There are plenty of free tools available to help you get started with SEO, including Ubersuggest.com, GTMetrix.com, Ahrefs.com, similarweb.com and many more. SEO can get complicated, but if you remember four key points, it will be much simpler: Keyword research, relevant content, building authority, and ongoing maintenance.
2. Start a Website Blog
Good blogs are a great source of traffic. Make sure you are writing regular, high quality content that is relevant to potential customers. This will build a base of regular visitors, build trust in your site and if all goes well you will notice a boost in sales, enquiries or whatever your call-to-action may be. A blog is also a great way to boost your SEO, as search engines are always interested in fresh content.
3. Contribute to Complementary Websites
There are a plethora of forums, groups and discussions on the internet. People will be asking questions and debating about your area of expertise. Post some answers and wade into some arguments to build your presence online. If it's allowed, leave a link-back to your website, some people will click it. If they don’t then another link is still good for the search engines. Don’t be afraid to be controversial in what you say, even a negative response can be a good way to market your site.
4. Guest Blog on Related Websites
Don’t hog all of your best content for your blog. Writing some guest articles for another blog, with a link to your blog, can give your website a boost in traffic. This effect will be exacerbated if you manage to get yourself onto a prominent blog within your niche.
5. RSS and Email Subscription to Your Website
Setting up both of these give you great access to your visitors, improving your ability to attract them back to your website and convert them to customers. RSS feeds tend to have higher subscription rates but emailing yields more conversions, so include both. For guidance on your emailing strategy check out our articles on newsletters.
6. Affiliate and Pay-Per-Click Marketing
You can easily pay for traffic with schemes such as Google AdSense but I would recommend that you set up an affiliate program. The beauty of using affiliates is that you only pay for ads once you have made a sale from it, so there is zero risk that you will throw money down the advertising drain. If you do decide to use pay-per-click, do some research into your choice of keywords. Generally highly searched terms also have strong competition. Try to find the right keywords (or combination of keywords) that will work for your site, and don’t be afraid of experimenting a bit.
7. Social Media Website SEO
SEO on your site is as old as the internet, try applying some similar theories to your social media pages.
8. Promote Your Other Pages
Promoting the other pages of your website on every page will reduce the bounce rate of visitors by keeping them on your site. Try and link to similar, or related content that the reader will probably be interested in. Having read one article on your site, they trust you as a source and a few will probably be interested in your product or service. For example, after reading this article, why not read about What We Do?
9. Partnerships
Approach a person or company whose product or service align well with yours to offer them in tandem. This opens your business up to the partners customer base, of which a high percentage will be interested due to the compatible nature of the partners niches.
10. Swag
A great strategy for getting the company name, logo design and branding out in the public eye is to have some merchandise printed with them on. T-shirts, pens, pencils, bottle openers, everything you can buy and print onto cheaply can work wonders for your website. Websites such as CafePress only need your logo or slogan and even sell them for you. You can also try Printful.com for on-demand printing and distribution.
11. Talk to Your Customers
Customers usually know exactly what they want, and they know what would bring them back. Ask them, listen to their answers, adjust your website accordingly and your website will be a success. Word of mouth is still an incredibly powerful marketing force and building a strong customer relationship is one of the strongest marketing strategies around.
Conclusions
There are plenty of things you can do to market your site, and you will never be finished. This list is not comprehensive, but if you act on the majority of these tips you should notice an improvement in your website performance. Please tweet or post on facebook your thoughts and comments.
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