Outsmart The Competition: Best SEO Practices, Tips and Tricks

Website Promotion Techniques: Best Practices

Creating Your Website Promotional Plan

Let WebTargetedTraffic take you on a wonderful joyride with this top FREE website promotion ideas that you can use to drive a highly targeted stream of potential customers to your website – driving your profits up without the exorbitant costs!

1. Go Viral with High Quality Content Targeted Customers will Love

Before everything else, first and foremost is you need to fill up your website with good, relevant, high-quality and highly-targeted content. Content is king, and will cling on to this throne for years to come. High-quality content that can go viral is a surefire way of driving targeted visitors to a website – visitors that can eventually become paying customers.

Content is at the heart and core of your website and is the hub where all your digital marketing efforts should revolve in. Content can be anything that you can place in your website: from great how-to articles to very informative step-by-step video tutorials. You can create these types of content yourself, or have a staff or freelancers create these content for you. You can even have guest writers or bloggers create something for you for posting in your website. The possibilities are practically endless and are guaranteed to generate highly targeted traffic – if your content is well-written, innovative, interesting, relevant and of course – original.

2. Use the Power of Social Media for Promotion

Digital Marketing Philippines’ articles on Social Media Marketing are some of the most exciting content this site is sharing and offering our readers. It’s free to join and create profiles about your brand, products or services on the various social networking sites available. Statistics on how effective social media marketing is abound throughout the Internet, with reliable information coming from reputable organizations like Nielsen and PQ Media backing these claims.

Online users allocate up to 21.3% of their time online checking their status, sharing photos, and liking posts on social media sites. PQ Media translates this into hours, highlighting that up to 33 hours a month the Internet users in the United States spend online, 8 hours of which are spent doing various activities on social media sites. Tapping and getting access to just a fraction of these figures can bring valuable promotion mileage for your websites.

Through social media, you can build a separate profile page for your website, brand or product where you can engage directly with your existing and potential customers. You can also build discussion groups and communities in these social sites and build a network of like-minded people – all potential audiences and customers for your brand.

3. Make Your Content Viral with Social Media Share

Social media is not only a highly effective tool for connecting and interacting with highly targeted audiences in a more personal and social level, it also made it quite easy for high-quality content you share to get even more reach with the use of social sharing buttons. You should include plug-ins for social media sharing with each of your content, practically allowing your visitors to spread the word about your website quickly and easily with just a single click of these buttons.

With search engine algorithms changing and leaning towards social relevance, ongoing social media sharing activities in your websites will definitely be a plus factor that can help your sites get better ranking. The more social media sharing activities going on, the better your social scores can be.

4. Make Your Content Go Even More Viral with Social Media Bookmarking

Social media shares can let your content go viral, but with social media bookmarking, your targeted audiences can include your website among their favorites. What this will do for your site is to get your readers well be updated with your latest posts and uploads, reach even more targeted audiences within your readers’ own networks, and give your websites tons of high quality backlinks coming from high-traffic social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit to name a few and fasting growing specific bookmarking sites like Sharebloc, Snapzu BizSugar, Triberr and Inbound.org. You can’t go wrong posting your contents here, just don’t forget the golden rule. Don’t self-promote your contents only. Curate the best links of our other sites also and post it there.

5. Improve Your Online Presence by Local Business Directories

Online local directories is one of the best ways a local business owner can promote his or her business. Sites like Google+ local, Bing local, Yahoo local, Yelp, Manta and others allowed you to list your local business and gain targeted exposure to your targeted audience in your area. Maximize all the features that these local directories are offering you and always strive to persuade your customers to leave honest reviews about your business there! More positive reviews you get in your listing the better exposure for your business.

6. Get Better Website Exposure through Niche Forum Marketing

Forum marketing these days is not very popular subject these days since most of the people right now are going into social media groups instead of a niche related forum. But since our goal here is to give you the most complete list of free website promotion ideas, we also wanted to give the most comprehensive options and forum marketing is one of that. Basically, what you can do is perform a search like this your market + forum and check the top 10 in the search engine results. Then choose the top 3-4 forums by checking which forums are having the most conversation and the # of active members.

The idea of forum marketing is for you to share your expertize and brand yourself as an expert in your field. So don’t just go to these forums and blatantly promote your business but share your expertize and engage to the members. Who knows who you might find on these forums? In the past, I have known some great people that I found in forums and until today they are still a great resource person for me in the digital marketing niche.

7. Get Quality Backlinks by Being a Guest Author or Guest Blogger

To get more exposure and high-quality backlinks from other sites that are relevant or related to your website’s own niche, you can write and publish articles for these sites as a guest author or blogger. There are blogging community websites where you can join as a guest writer, allowing you to create your own author’s bio where you can embed backlinks to your websites. You can also work with individual blogs or websites or be a guest author on local newspapers or magazine blogs – and boost your online credibility as well as get really valuable backlinks.

8. Receive Great Promotion by Getting Guest Authors to Write for You

Writing in blogging communities and other blogs or websites builds your network, getting you acquainted or even friends with other website owners that are related or relevant to your niche. You can ask these writers to write for you by inviting them as guest bloggers in exchange for better exposure and organic links. These writers will naturally promote these articles posted on your website on their own accord, giving you free promotion from what search engines may classify as authorities in your niche

9. Gain Good Reputation by Writing in Content Sites

You can develop your reputation as an authoritative source of information or expertise in your niche by writing and publishing niche articles on content sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and Business2Commuity. Although there’s some arguments on whether the backlinks from these sites are still relevant in the current search engine algorithm changes, the reputation you can gain as an authoritative writer in your niche would still make all your efforts pay off.

10. Answer Questions and Build Your Brand

Social media sites focused on posting questions like Yahoo Answers and Quora where people can answer and ranked based on how relevant their answers are in relation to the question is also a good free website promotion idea. You can build your brand by being authoritative source of information who uses his expertise by trying to unselfishly answer relevant questions posted. You can build your brand, gain better reputation, and build relationships with potential customers.

11. Build Relationships by Responding to Comments and Answering Inquiries

Online users can really get pissed off when they post inquiries and comments about certain items or topics about a brand, product or service – and receive neither answers nor acknowledgements in return. Commenting and answering inquiries can build your online relationships with these targeted audiences, which is a good way to build your brand and develop product loyalty. You can also turn these inquiries or comments in a Q&A type of article and post it in your site – a move your targeted audiences will surely appreciate.

12. Use Video to Promote Your Websites

YouTube and other video sharing sites have become an incredible phenomena that launched the careers of very popular modern artists as well as generate valuable traffic to websites through videos and infomercials. Most of these videos talk about topics relevant or linking to a brand, product or service directly or indirectly. You can leverage on the power of these video sharing sites by creating your own creative, thought-provoking and highly interesting videos and slideshows that can go viral through social media – and drive tons of traffic to your website

13. Build Your Own Following with Social Media Groups Marketing

Social media groups in the top social media sites like Facebook, Google+ and Linked-in can also be used for free website promotion. The first thing that you are going to do is to search for the most relevant and related groups for your business. Then join the busiest group (in terms of engagement and comments activities). I think it better to join at least 5-10 niche related groups on these 3 social media sites. Again don’t forget the golden rule here, you are joining these groups to show your expertise and brand yourself and your business as a great resource for your niche. So engage to the members post, share their posts to your accounts, provide your ideas and opinions on their posts or questions, don’t balatantly self-promote and lastly don’t forget to post your relevant content from time to time.

14. Write content around a topic with organic search traffic potential

The work begins even before you produce your content. Keyword research is essential to your SEO success: you do this to make sure that there’s a market for the content you’re about to produce. When your content ranks for tons of popular search terms, that’s when your traffic begins to soar.

Since there are too many variables involved in performing keyword research (everybody’s goals, resources, timeframes, competitive landscapes, etc differ), there’s no one‐size‐fits‐all method to this.

Instead, here’s a reliable keyword research framework that you can adjust to your needs. You might also be interested in learning how to find the easiest keywords to rank for.

15. Boost website promotion with social media

Social media is another excellent way to promote your website and increase awareness of your brand. With social media marketing, you don’t just share advertisements or show your customers pictures of your products; you connect with your audience on a deeper level.

Setting up a social media strategy is easy enough, as anyone can create a business-focused Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account. The key to success is making sure that you select the social media channel that appeals most to your target customer. For instance:

• • Facebook is currently the world’s most popular social channel, with over 2.23 billion users.

• • Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat are best-suited to companies with a highly visual business strategy.

• • LinkedIn is the ultimate solution for B2B companies because it’s focused on building professional connections.

• • Twitter is ideal for capturing the attention of PR companies and reporters.

One particularly great thing about social media is that you don’t have to do all the work alone. If someone in your community likes what you post, they can share it with their network, and improve your reach through word of mouth marketing.

16. Display and Re-targeting

Cookies are your friend, especially when it comes to the retargeting marketing method that helps businesses with their branding and conversion rate. This form of marketing uses cookies, that stay in a user’s browser as they surf the web and re-expose those visitors to your brand after they’ve left your site.

Since a very low percentage of people purchase a product or service on their first visit (estimates are lower than 5%), you can use retargeting to display what they were looking at already. People are already familiar with your brand when they are being retargeted, so it’s a great advertising tool because your ads are being seen by a relevant audience who have already indicated that they were interested in your services.

The ad acts as a gentle visual reminder to the client that they were looking at your product/service at one time. Seeing your product displayed again may prompt them to visit your site and this time, make a purchase.

17. Asking Clients to Review your Products / Services

Customer reviews are important because the vast majority of people today are listening to what others have to say about your business. If you have a Google My Business account, your customers can now see your overall star rating once five or more people review your business. This helps your company stand out from others when people are searching for products and services that you offer. Create a link that customers can click to leave a review of your business on Google, and actively encourage them to leave reviews. You can easily share the link with customers to encourage them to write reviews and rate your business. If reviews are negative, reach out to the client directly and see how the experience could have been made better. Clients are not out to get your business, and will most likely remove a negative review if they are attended to and heard.

18. Joining Online Communities

Steve Jobs, once said “People with passion can change the world.” Whatever you are blogging about, you can always find enthusiasts who share the same passion. Leverage the community,  join groups on Facebook, create a community on your website and reach out to like-minded people all over the world through your blog.