Traffic is everything for online businesses. But website promotion is challenging, especially when you are a new business. It’s even a lot more difficult to drive traffic to your site on a limited or no budget.
Targeted traffic can increase leads, sales and ultimately makes it easy to run a successful business but without the right audience, your business will struggle.
If you are launching a new business, it’s imperative to create a website to leverage the huge number of people who are looking for products or services you intend to sell or offer. It’s crucial to create an amazing website that’s easy to use.
This video can help you learn how to make a website in 12 minutes. It will teach you step-by-step how to create a website from scratch – and for free.
You can get a website up for your business today, if you have not yet created one for your new business. And you don’t even have to spend your marketing budget on getting a website. Wix allows you to create a website for free. No tech skills required. Just pick a template, change anything you want, add your images, videos, text and more to get online instantly.
It pays to optimise your site
Search engine optimization (SEO) has always been key to driving traffic to any website. Make your website as visible as possible in search engine’s organic results by taking care of the basics. Align your website and all its elements to the recommendations and standards of search engines. The purpose of SEO is to make it easy for search engines to recommend your website for relevant searches.
Traffic from search engines can be extremely powerful for your business not only because there is a lot of traffic, but because there is a lot of very specific, high-intent traffic. Apps like Site Booster and SEO Wizard are helpful tools you should consider to increase your chances of getting found on search engines.
These promotion ideas can help you get targeted traffic to your site. Try as many of them as possible. And narrow down to the ones that work best for your business and focus on them one hundred percent until you master them and use the tactics to your maximum benefit. You will find some great examples of how to promote your website for free in this post. The quick and strategic ideas below will position your business for growth now and in the future.
Invest in engaging, valuable and quality content
Content marketing can significantly improve your online presence. Quality content will always be king. Popular brands are now investing huge resources into getting quality content out there to educate their prospective customers. Fortunately for you, it doesn’t have to cost you a fortune.
Focus on great posts that are linkable and share-worthy. And write for humans first. Customer education should be your priority. It’s the foundation of any successful content marketing strategy. The trick is finding content ideas that have proven to work in the past. Buzzsumo is a great tool that can help you find the most shared content for any topic or industry.
You can start by writing on topics in your industry that your audience will find useful. People are constantly looking for information to help them make the right decision. Provide free educational content on your website. Great content gets great results. Focus on timeless content people will still find useful next year or even the year after.
Go the extra mile to make your content better than others you have found. And make it insanely easy to share. It will feel like it’s a huge time investment upfront, but it will pay off in the end.
Don’t stop at a few posts, find a few more popular topics in your industry and create a lot more amazing content. Once you position your brand as a thought leader in your space, people will soon believe your website is a credible source of information. Help your audience to think of your website as a resource worth visiting again. You can also create other content formats including ebooks, infographics and share them on relevant platforms.
Syndicate your blog posts on other popular related sites
Content syndication is the process of pushing your educational content (blog posts, video content, infographics, ebooks, etc.) out into third-party sites. If you get it right, syndication can be one of the most effective ways to help build your reputation and visibility online.
The best way to do this is to research blogs or educational sites that cover similar industry and reach out to them with a syndication proposal or better still content exchange request. If your content is very informative and timeless, chances are your proposal will be successful. Make sure your site has a sizeable number of posts before getting in touch with others.
Content swap works better because every site wants new audience. Content syndication is popular among top publishers. If you’re creating an amazing content, related sites wouldn’t mind republishing them and linking back to the original article.
Measures should be taken to avoid duplicate content. To increase your chances of success, reach out to similar blogs or sites in the same situation in terms of size and audience.
Position your brand as an industry expert on Quora
Quora has some of the best answers to any question about most industries. Quora is a question-and-answer website created, edited, and organized by its community of users. One of the great ways to build up your professional brand is to simply answer people’s questions.
If you know enough to start a business or launch a website, you can help others who have issues in your industry. Even if you’re not the top expert on a particular topic, chances are you still know more than others.
Social media has given brands the opportunity to participate in conversations and offer expert advice or insights. Make the most of Quora to increase traffic to your site. Provide insightful answers that people find will very helpful, and they’ll be curious about the source.
Quora might not have the same audience as Twitter or Facebook, but it shouldn’t be ignored. You can get exposure to Quora’s over 1.5 million monthly visitors worldwide. And you can share content from your website in topic-focused questions and discussions.
Build targeted presence of social media
You can get your business, idea, product or service to the right audience without a social presence. If you haven’t already created social accounts, get started as soon as possible. Building a loyal following can boost your reach on social networks. Explore each option and see what the best fit is for your business or posts.
Don’t forget to connect your social profiles to your blog. Make it easy for users to follow you. The Social Bar from the Wix App Market allows you to add various social icons right to your site. Once people are following you on social media, they’ll be more inclined to share your content on their personal channels.
Promote your posts like your website depends on it
You can’t reap the benefits of your efforts if you don’t promote your articles. This is one of the most important steps in the entire process of traffic generation. Find relevant social media sites, Q&A sites, forums, video sharing sites etc. and get your content out to where they can be useful to the right audience.
Don’t choose to be on a social platform because it’s popular. Do your research and find out if the users will benefit from your content. And don’t share the same content formats on all of them. What works on Twitter may not necessarily work on Facebook on Pinterest. Research, observe, track and measure. And stick to what works. Repeat the process for new posts. Be consistent and your efforts will pay off.
Begin to expand your reach
Explore new ways to attract and retain readers. Email marketing still works. Give users the option to subscribe to your blog on your site. And keep in touch with them by sending out new posts to them very week. In the future, you can also update them about new products, offers and discounts.
Wix ShoutOut is one of the easiest ways to send beautiful newsletters and updates to your contacts. Customize the look and feel of your email by adding attractive images and compelling text. In addition to sending out stunning newsletters every week, you can share your emails on your social media platforms. It doesn’t get any easier to expand your audience and get more readers!
Take advantage of online ads
One of the best ways to reach even more targeted people is search marketing. Get your business more exposure by considering pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Programs like Bing Network and Google Adwords makes it easy to target users who search for products or services related to what you sell or offer.
If it sounds too complicated for you, SearchBoost, from the Wix AppMarket, can do the hard work for you by creating custom ads for Google and Bing while targeting the most relevant audience for your business. If you want to explore social advertising, you can create custom Facebook advertising campaigns with SocialBoost based on who you’re looking to target and what your budget is.
Find and get featured in roundup posts
People love lists. Some of the best posts that do well on popular sites are list of free resources. These articles typically get a good amount of traffic. Most sites that publish lists or roundup posts do them weekly or monthly.
Search for sites with the most lists and submit your posts to be included in future roundups. You could even create insightful roundup posts for your site and submit them to be featured on their sites. The key is finding weekly roundups in your niche that are being published regularly. Search strings like “keyword” + “weekly roundup”, “keyword” + “roundup” or “keyword” + “best of”. They can help you find sites that publish them.
Don’t ignore the power of Subreddits
Reddit is a social news networking service where registered members submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially an online bulletin board system.
It has popularly been dubbed “The Front Page of The Internet.” As 2015, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking 14th most visited website in US and 36th in the world. You can’t ignore that.
Reddit is known for discussions, ideas, and information. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called “subreddits”. The subreddit topics include business, entrepreneur, technology, small business, startups, among many others.
You can find subreddits of interest to your business or industry, subscribe to them and start answering questions.
Give your opinions freely on related subjects or topics being discussed. Just like Quora, you can harness subreddits to drive free traffic to your site.
Make sure your content is highly relevant to what that subreddit is discussing. And you can submit a new link or discussion (with a link to your content). If people like what you have submitted, your content will get upvoted. This gives it the exposure you need and attracts more clicks to links you submit.