Website Promotion Help Guide

Basic Website Promotion

Blog reviews
You can pay bloggers to review your website. This promotion method can give you a sudden boost in traffic if the blog has thousands of visitors per day. You can use Alexa rank to help you determine the traffic of a web site or blog. It’s not 100% accurate, so don’t rely on it completely.

Free classifieds
Free classified websites like Guntree and Criagslist are good for promoting services and products. The key is make sure you post your ad in the right section and not to abuse it. It might or might not work your business, but it’s definitely worth trying.

Error page / 404 page
A 404 error page is something your visitors would see if they have accidentally typed in the wrong address name or trying to view a page that you may have moved or renamed. By default, this page is VERY boring and not user friendly. So you should at least create an unique page with links to all internal pages on your website – just like a sitemap page. If you are not a web designer you probably will need someone to do this for you.

Give people testimonials
If you have used a product or service and you think it’s great, then what you can do is send a testimonial, along with your name and website url, to the supplier. If they publish it on their website you will get a one way link, and traffic also.

Give away free stuff
Everybody love free stuff. Why not create an ebook, report or guide on a topic that your customers would be interested to read about. You don’t need to be a writer to create a 10 – 20 pages guide on how to pick the right fishing rod for beginner. Make this guide free to download, and make sure you let the people know that they can give it to their friends or put it on their website as long as they give you the credit by linking back to your website.

Yahoo Answers
Answering people’s questions on the Yahoo Answers website can bring highly targeted traffic to your website. Use the search function to find questions are related your product or service. Always give detailed answers and leave your website address in the source box. If they find your answer useful they will click the link to visit your website.

Directory submission
Submitting your website to web directories can increase its search engine ranking. There are many web directory submission tools that can help you do this task quickly. Check their website carefully before paying for the service.

Blogging
Blogging can not only help your website’s ranking on the search engines, but also your business’ reputation on the Internet. It can be used to find out what your customers want, think and need. If used properly, it can help you to understand your target market better, which will result more sales and less marketing costs.

Blog commenting
Comment on blogs that related your website can help promoting your product or service. Most blogs have the nofollow function built in, which means you won’t get any link value from them. However, they can still give you the benefit of traffic. Leave useful comments and you would be surprise how much traffic you could get from a couple of comments on a high traffic blog.

eBay
Any charity auctions on eBay will attract charities linking back to your item’s page. What you can do is put a link back to your business website on that page. Any authority links can give your website a huge boost in the search engine rankings.

Article marketing
Write articles on subjects that you have a good knowledge of and then submit them to article directories like Ezinearticles.com. Make sure you write something that your customers are interested to read. One of the best ways to know this by going to niche forums and groups. If you see the same question appeared more than five to ten times then chances are you will get some good traffic by writing an article about it.

Forum marketing
You can promote your website on forums that are related to your business. To do this, simply answer people’s questions as much as you can, and provide useful information or links that might help others. Your website promotion can be done effectively without doing any direct promotions. Just let your signature link to do the work for you.

Press releases
You will receive a lot of visitors to your website if a newspaper publish an article about your business. You need to have an “interesting story” to share with the public and it’s harder to say than do.

Find partners
Find non-competing businesses that have the same type of customers to promote your website. In return, you will have to offer them something valuable, like a link on your website etc.

Local Business Networking Meetings
Most likely there are get together of local business professionals in your area, and these are great ways to go meet new people to network with and at the same time promote your blog or brand. If you do not know how to find these events just look up your local Chamber of Commerce website and usually they will have listings. When you attend these events you can use nice giveaways such as personalised pens or other useful items to help promote in a cost effective way.

Build email list
Use autoresponder to build a list of potential customer details. It’s a good way to let your customers know that you are the expert in your field. Give them useful information as often as you can.

Email marketing
Nearly everybody have access to email today, but most don’t reall ALL emails because they get so many junk emails – spams. So if you want to get yours stand out from the rest then you need to provide something that’s valuable to them. Never try to sell in the first email, because it just doesn’t work. Build a list; more importantly, build a relationship.

Web 2.0 sites
These are websites that allow you to create your own page on their site. One good example is Squidoo.. You can create a page that focus on a specific topic in your industry. Join the groups within the Squidoo site and use it promote your website.

Link exchange
Although many people are saying this method is no longer working. However, we think it still has some value if done properly. Make sure you ONLY do link exchange with web sites that are related and have quality unqiue contents. If a website has 100 links to all kinds of websites then you should avoid it.

Traffic exchanges
There are so many traffic exchange website on the net. Basically you would have to visit other people’s website and in return, they will visit your website. You need to visit two or three websites before you can get one visit to your website, so if time is an issue for you then this may not be such an good way to promote your website.

Google AdWords
Google AdWords is a quick way to get traffic to your website. Using this promotion method is not free but it can give instant traffic to your website without doing a lot of work. Having said that, if you want to use it effectively you need to research the keywords to find the right ones for your business. There are many tools and guides that can help you with that.

Website Promotion With Pay-Per-Click

Use keywords in the display URL
If you are promoting a seo service website you should have the keyword “seo service” in the display URL like this – www.my-website-domain.com/seo-service

Put keywords in groups
It is important that you do not put different keywords in the same campaign. If you do so, it will become very difficult for you to find out which keywords are performing well and it might also affect your cost per click.

Keep track of your keyword positions
In case your keyword rankings are in the top three positions, then you should lower your bids and aim for the fifth position or below because those positions tend to convert better.

Experiment with the different titles, words and formatting
The thing with Pay-Per-Click is that small changes can make a big difference in click-through rates, which also affects the cost that you would pay per click.

Put keywords on the landing page
Make sure the keyword you are biding for is on the landing page. Doing so will give you a high quality score, which will result lower cost per click.

Have a good list of keywords
It is important that you have spent some time in the keyword research process. Wordtracker is the best tool for that. Don’t just focus on the high volume keywords, because their bid prices are most likely more expensive than lower keywords.

Use the Adword Editor to save time
If you are serious about using Adword to promote your website then you need to use the Adword Editor. It allows you add thousands of keywords, adgroups, ads and campaigns with just a few clicks. You will also need Excel if you want to get the most out of Adword Editor.

Don’t get into a bidding war
You will find some people are bidding way over the normal rate. Never try to bid higher than them because some of these guys are actually losing and you probably won’t see them there in a week’s time.

Bid on targeted keywords that buyers would type in
Bidding on general keywords like “website design” for example is a waste of time and money unless you put in a lot of negative keywords. Keywords like “website design service London” is what a buyer would type in.

Use other Pay-Per-Click networks
Don’t just focus on Google. There are many other Pay-Per-Click networks like MSN adCenter, Miva, ASK, Adbrite, Bidvertiser and Kanoodle. These networks may not give you as much traffic as Google, but the cost per click is much lower than Google in most cases.

Create effective and targeted ads
If you are bidding for the keyword “web design software” then make sure you put that keyword in the title and in the description and url too if possible.

Put benefits first in the ad
Write the benefits in the first line can increase the click through rate. Try to think about what the user’s intention is and then write the “solution” in your ad.

Use broad, phrase and exact match types
When you start a brand new campaign to promote your web site you should use all three match types in Adword. Doing so can help you find out which keywords are profitable, which ones are getting impressions but not clicks etc. You can then use these information to help you make further decisions.

Use negative keywords
You can use negative keywords to help you get cheaper clicks if you are using the broad and/or phrase match type.

Avoid contextual targeting if your margin is thin
Contextual ads are those that appears on websites that related to your keywords. Those are Adsense sites. If your margin is thin then you might want to avoid using contextual ads because you will get a lot of low-quality clicks.

Geo-targeting
If the majority of your customers are from your own country then you should promote your website in your country only.

Day parting
If you know what time or day your ads converts the most then you should use the day parting feature in Adword. This would allow you to set the time or day which you would like your ad to show.

Use two or three different ads
Always have two or three different ads running for each keyword. This is called the split testing. After about 30 – 50 clicks you will be able to find out which ad is better.

Not so obvious keywords
No matter what industry you are in, there are not so obvious keywords that most of your competitors are not bidding on, which means you can get very cheap clicks and some would actually convert better than the obvious ones!

Track everything
You should be tracking everything from day one. Make sure the tracking code is on the conversion page before you start your campaigns. Doing so can help you find out which keywords are converting well.

Send people to the right page
Unless you have one page sales letter website, then you have no choice but to send people to the homepage, otherwise you should send people to the page that is most relevant to the keyword you are bidding on.

Website Promotion With Search Engine Optimisation

Domain age
The age of your website domain can have impacts on its ranking on Google. Older domain tends to rank better because it’s perceived as being more established and trustworthy.

Update your website regularly
If you update your website on a regular basis the search engine bots will come to your website more frequently. It will also improve the ranking of your website because Google likes fresh contents.

Write contents for humans
When writing copy for your website you should focus on the users and not the search engines. Which means don’t try to “force” the keywords in and just write naturally.

Avoid using Flash for the whole website
We all know that Flash websites are very appealing and fun to use for the users if done properly. However, they are no good for search engines because the text within a Flash website cannot be read by the search engine bots. Having said that, it’s ok to use Flash for small parts of your website, like the header banner for example.

Use meta tags
Even though meta tags do not contain the same values as much as they used to be, they are still worth paying attention to, especially the description tag because search engines use this on their results page.

Use heading tags
Heading tags are important because they helps the search engines to understand the importance of the some parts of your website.

Sitemap
A sitemap can help the search engines to find and index your pages quicker. It’s important to create ans submit one after your website is ready to go live.

Use bold on keywords
If you bold the keywords a few times in your article you can tell the search engines that those keywords are important.

Internal links
Make sure all pages have at least one link to them to avoid the “dead end” problem with search engine bots.

Business address
If you have a business address you should put that on the website. This can make your website look more legit and trustworthy.

Optimise images
Make sure you put the keywords in the alt and title attribute of the images.

Link exchange
Exchanging links are still effective today. If possible try to get three or even four way links.

Use keywords in link text
It’s important to link to pages within your own website with the targeted keywords. The same goes for external links. You need to mix them up a little to make the links look more natural.

Keyword research
Before you start optimising your website you should have a list of primary and secondary keywords. Primary keywords are ones that are more competitive and have more searches. And secondary keywords are ones that less competitive and have fewer searches.

Have keywords on the page
You should have at least have the keywords on the page at least once or twice.

Avoid invisible contents
You should avoid using tricks like using white text on a white background to get more keywords on the page. The search engine is smart enough to pick these kind of tricks up.

Over use of Heading tags is bad
Avoid using too many h1 or h2 tags on a single page.

Search engine marketing is not a race
Search engine marketing is not something that you can do quickly and expect to see results overnight. You need to be doing the work on a regularly basis and it will take at least 3 to 6 months before you can see any decent results.

Create quality content
If the content on your website is interesting, people will link to it and recommend it to their friends. You can use good content as “bait” to attract natural links.

Make the file names SEO friendly
Make sure the file names on your website are properly named and use keywords wherever appropriate.

Use a blog
Blogging can be a extremely powerful way to build links to your main website. It can also be used as a platform to connect with your customers.

Website Promotion With Social Media

Use the same nickname
When you create accounts on social media web sites you should use the same nickname.user name. This can help you cross promote your profiles.

Share quality information and knowledge
Social media websites are for people who share the same interests. By sharing good and solid information on these websites can help establishing yourself.

Use your profile page
Never under estimate the power of the profile sections on these social media websites. Put your website address, email address and company name there.

Use bookmarking websites
You should use bookmarking websites to bookmark your blog posts. Some bookmarking websites are dofollow, which means the links will have search engine values.

Research social media websites
Before you start using social media websites you should find out which ones are good for your industry.

Build a relationship
You need to build trusts first in the social media world before people will consider doing business with you.

Spread the words
You can use social media websites to help you spread a link bait or good contents.

Be prepare for the high traffic
Usually when you post links to bookmarking websites you will receive a ton of traffic coming to your website overnight. Make sure your server can handle this before doing the promotions, or have a backup server.

Market research
You can use social media websites to find out what your customers’ thoughts are on your product or service. Being able to do so can help you understand what your customers like and don’t like.

Don’t take it personally
Don’t take it personally or upset if you found a negative comment about your product or service. That person has actually “helped” you by telling you how you can make your product or service better.

Help people with professionalism
When answering people’s questions, try to answer them with as much information as you can. Use simple words wherever possible.

Yahoo answers
Yahoo Answers is a Q&A website that can help you build trust and get traffic to your website. Again, answer people’s questions with professionalism and people will more likely to click on your website link.

Use videos
The use of videos can be an effective way to promote your website. Most of the social media websites allows you to put videos on them. You can put the same video on muliple sites.

Create an unique avastar
If you are serious about social marketing you should have your own unique avastar image. This can help people remembering you and your business.

Get specific groups
There are specific groups on some social media websites which you could join and talking to people who are in the same industry as you. If you focus on giving instead of getting from these groups then you can quickly get your name known.

Use RSS
It’s important to use RSS feed to syndicate your blog posts across these social media websites whereever possible.

Build links to your website
You can get quality links from social media websites. Majority of them have high Pagerank and perceived as authority sites, therefore links from these websites can help boosting your website’s search engine ranking.

Use Twitter to get traffic
Twitter is getting more popular each and every day. You can benefit from this website by syndicating your blog posts as well as posting useful resources on the net.

Website Promotion With Articles

Have a goal in mind
Before you start writing and submitting articles to directories you should think about what you want to get out of them. Do you want the articles to bring traffic to your website or do you want them to boost your website’s search engine ranking.

Quality is more important than keywords
You should focus on writing articles that people would want to read. A good quality article can give you much more benefits than one that stuffed with keywords.

Write articles regularly
It’s important to write at least one article per week to help improving your writing skill. Just like anything else, the more you practice it, the better and quicker you will be at doing it.

Pick the right article directories
There are only about ten article directories that worth submitting your articles to. Ezinearticles.com is one of them.

Avoid duplicate content
If you have written an article on your blog, don’t submit the same article to article directories because doing so can do more harm than good to your website.

Put links on your article
Most article directories allow you to have two links in the about section. You should take advantage of this by having one link to the homepage and the other one goes to a sub-page.

Use articles to generate traffic to your website
If you don’t mind spending some time doing keyword research you can use articles to attract people to your website. Articles normally rank well for long tail keywords.

Reuse articles
Put 10 or more of your existing articles together to make a guide/ebook. You can then use this guide to generate leads on your website.

Use keywords naturally
Once you have collected a list of good keywords you should then write one article for each keyword. Use the keywords naturally in the articles; this way you will get the maximum benefits.

Look at other people’s articles
Have a browse around on the article directory sites and see what others have written. Study the ones that have attracted a lot of views and then do the same, but don’t copy them directly!

You can use more than one name
Popular websites like ezinearticles.com allows you to create several accounts and pen names, which means you can create an unique account for each one of your websites. This can help you keep the articles more organised and have a more professional image.

Make the paragraphs short and easy to read
Reading on the Web is not the same as reading a magazine. If you want people to read your article from top to bottom then you need to make sure the formatting is reader friendly. Create short paragraphs; use bullet points; use sub headings and make them bold.

Word count matters
There is one fixed rule for how many words your article should be. Having said so, you should keep it between 400 to 600 words.

Use articles on social media websites
Don’t limit use of your articles on directory web sites. You can also use them on social media web sites like Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s important to diversify your link building campaign to ensure the incoming links are “natural”.

Give your articles to bloggers
There are many bloggers out there who don’t have the time to update their blog every day or week. So if you can give them quality contents for free, with a link goes back to your website, it would be an offer that
most people cannot refuse.

Website Promotion With Email

Send valuable information
If you send send useful information to your customers by email, they will more likely to stay on your list. People receive so many junk emails, which means if you send them something very valuable they will appreciate your time and trust you more.

Write the emails in a friendly tone
If you make your emails sound more personal, and not something that you would send out to thousands of people then people will feel more important and spend the time to read your email.

Don’t over do it
You should send out emails or newsletters to your customers at the rate of no more than one in a month. Anything more than that they will either block your email address or ignore all emails you send after that.

Make the email short and to the point
People are busy nowdays, so if they see an email that has 600 words they will not click the delete or close button.

Don’t send emails to strangers
It’s also known as spam. You should only send emails to the people who have either subscribed to your newsletter or have contacted you before (i.e. old clients).

Emails works better with existing customers
Emails works much better with existing customers than potential customers. So by focusing more on your existing customers will give you better ROI.

Make sure your emails get pass the spam filter
You can check whether your email will pass the spam filter by using this tool.

Check your email with different email programs
If you are emailing out a HTML newsletter it’s important to check it with different email programs and online email services. You will be surprised how different each one will render your newsletter!

Do not send a large volume of emails quickly
If you need to send out 1000 emails, try to send them in small chunks of 100 to avoid the server being flagged up.

Include your details
It’s important to include your business’ details like your name, telephone number, address and business name at the bottom of every email you send out.

Track your email campaigns
There are tools that you can use to track how many people have opened and clicked the links in your email. Use it before you start, otherwise you will have no way to knowing how well the campaign performed.

Group your customers
After a few months or so you will have various types of customers. Some have bought something from you, some have contacted you but have not bought anything and some didn’t even reply your emails at all. By putting them in groups you will be able to tailor your emails to different groups of people.

Never try to sell in your first email
Do not try to sell your product or service in the first email because that just doesn’t work anymore.

Watch the size of your attachments
If you are attaching a file with the email you should make sure it’s not bigger than 1-2MB. Anything bigger than that should be uploaded to your server first and then include a link in the email, or you can use an online file sending service.

Website Promotion With Videos

Demonstrate your product or service
You can use videos to show your customers how your product works or how to install something. If you offer a website design service you could create videos to show people the step by step process of building a professional website.

Give a complete and accurate picture of what you are selling
Make sure that you cover every aspect of your product in your video. Also make sure to include important points, like how to order, guarantees and other important information that the consumer should know.

Convey how important the customer is to you
Make the customer feel important. Use phrases that say you care about the customer and that you are selling them this product because you know it will benefit them and help them.

Demonstrate the unique qualities of your product
You want to highlight why your product is better than other similar products on the market. You need to highlight the unique features and aspects of your product. This is standard marketing, but something easily forgotten in the process of creating a sales video.

Get testimonials in video
Video testimonials are very effective and can greatly boost the your potential customers’ confidence in your product or service.

Use videos to get traffic
Video portal sites like Youtube and Dailymotion attracts millions of visitors per day. By putting your videos on these popular sites will definitely help you in promoting your website and business.

Increase the perceived value
Videos can be used to increase the perceived value of your product or service. Make sure they are professionally created and the information is valuable.

Increase conversion rate of your website
Depending on what industry you are in, using a few simple intro or howto videos on your website can sometimes increase the conversion rate.

Think about your visitors
Before you start making some videos with blue stars and lightning in the background you should first find out what your customers would like to see or learn. Also, have a look at your competitors’ websites and see what they have done.

Use stock videos to save time
You can buy quality stock videos from websites like istockphotos.com. You can mix them up and use them in your own projects.

Do not use background music
Unless you are in the entertainment industry, you should avoid using music in the background because this can very distracting and/or annoying for some people.

Avoid special effects
Don’t try to be clever by using a lot of special effects in your videos. You are not making a film or demo reel here. If that’s the case then do use them, otherwise stick to simple plain background and don’t include anything that might distract the audience.

Understand the pros and cons of different video formats
The best video format for the Web would be Flash and Quicktime. Flash video is common nowdays and 95% of the Internet users now have Flash plugin installed.

Focus on one thing
You should focus on getting only one message or point across with each video. Doing so will ensure your message is delivered to your audience effectively.

You need to edit your video
Before you publish your video to the Web you must edit it to make sure everything flows and makes sense. In addition to that, you might also want to add your company’s details to the video.

Test your video
Play your video on both PC and Mac to make sure it appears the way you wanted. Then, upload the video to your server and try to stream the video from the Internet.

Give people the controls
If you are hosting the videos on your own server you need to make sure the video player has all the basic controls like play, pause, volume and full screen buttons.

Use third party video hosting websites
You can use third party websites like Youtube or Dailymotion to host your videos and then embed the videos on your website. The benefit of doing this would be less load on your server, which means cheaper running cost for you. Another benefit is that your videos will be seen by more people.

Choose the right images and people for your video
You need to keep in mind that your videos are representing your company, so it’s important to make sure you use professional images and people.

Get ideas from other mediums
If you are stuck with ideas you could look at TV commercials, magazine ads, movies and billboards etc. You will find that good ideas are normally come from places that you would least expected.

Learn from other people’s videos
You can learn a lot by looking at videos made by the top marketers like Joel Comm, Mark Joyner, Eben Pagen and many others. Study the videos on their sales letters.

Spread your video on the Web quickly
There are online services that can submit your videos to video websites for you with a few clicks. So if you are planning to do a lot of video marketing you might want to consider signing up to one of these services.

Name your videos properly
Search engines like Google is now showing videos on their search results, which means that if you put keywords in the title and description your videos then they will receive more traffic.

Try not to sell your product or service
Avoid making a video that looks like/is a sales pitch. If you do, your visitors see it as being an advertisement and that’s the last thing they would want to see.