How to promote a website is one of the major problems that has to be solved when promoting an online business (a.k.a. e-business) because many (most?) such businesses will have a web site as a major element, if not the main one.
I’ve visited this territory before in my E-Business Testing post of a couple of days ago, but I thought giving the topic a post to itself, to collect the methods I can think of in one place, would be worthwhile. This is a list of four things you can do, but that doesn’t mean you have to do all of them. Also, which ones are appropriate for your site depends on various factors: the nature of your site and your budget, being two examples.
- Targeting the free search engine listings (using search engine optimisation). The most traditional method and, because it targets the free search results, the one most likely to bring the best results in terms of the longevity of large amounts of traffic. The downside is you have to do quite a lot of work to do in terms of learning. Besides the things you should do, there are quite a lot of things you need to be aware of that you should avoid doing. Also, typically it takes a lot of time for a site to achieve high rankings; this may well mean three months before you see results, and it could mean six months or even a year! This is not an article on search engine optimisation practices so I won’t go into it in any depth, however you must read Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide as the most basic introduction.
- Buying search engine traffic using pay-per-click advertising. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is among the very cheapest approaches to advertising that reaches lots of people quickly. You need to be aware that the value you get from this will depend very much on how much work you put into planning your ad and also into your keyword targeting. Both of these are quite large topics but just a quick word about the latter: besides paying close attention to the keywords/key-phrases for which you do want your ad to be shown, also pay attention to any negative words/phrases for which you do not want it to appear. Sorry not much detail there, but hopefully an article about it (at least one whole article is needed to cover the topic) sometime soon.
- Distributing leaflets or business cards. Just get lots of leaflets and/or business cards printed with brief information about your site on them; obviously this information must include the web address! There are several online services that will do this for the cost of postage if you allow the service to print a small advert for their own services somewhere on you card/leaflet. I’ve advised in favour of using a paid service (thus not having the provider’s own ad) in my article How Not To Present a Business but I think in some cases promoting a web site is one of the exceptions; it does depend, though, on who you are targeting – in particular whether it’s businesses or the general public – and you also just have to apply common sense. Of course, when using this approach, you do have to think carefully about whether you have access to sufficient places to distribute your promotional leaflets to make it worthwhile. Also, bear in mind that for most sites, just distributing the leaflets will not get you enough visitors – it’s just a way of getting a few initial visitors and you are relying on them telling other people, and the spreading of the word of mouth in general.
- Advertise on television. Not much to say here except that obviously this is the most costly method, but the one likely to get the most visitors in the shortest amount of time!
- Advertise on the radio? I must admit I’ve not idea how effective this is or how much it costs, but I thought it would be worth having it on the list. Please comment if you have any information. To be honest I’m sceptical about the effectiveness of advertising a web site on radio: I just think it would be too easy for people to get the web address wrong from just hearing it spoken, too easy for it to be forgotten, or both!
