Wow doesn’t time fly! It’s just over six months since my last blog post, so this one is well overdue.
For this post, I thought I would focus on promoting your website and particularly ways that are quick, easy and free.
Picture the scene, your new website has just gone live. It looks amazing and has great content, but is anyone looking at it? Probably not. Why not? Because they don’t know it exists. What can we do change this?
There are lots of articles about promoting websites, but most seem to focus on longer term strategies e.g. SEO, blogging, email marketing. These are all great suggestions (I would argue SEO is essential and should be considered as part of the site creation) but they will require a fair amount of time and effort, they are not the focus of this post. If you have some money to spend you could also try advertising using Google Adwords or Facebook (or any other channels you consider worthwhile). Anyway, on to the quick, easy and free ideas:
- Install Google Analytics – while this won’t directly promote your website it will help you measure your success. You’ll be able to see how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from and measure improvements over time.
- Add details of your business and website to Google My Business. This will help you appear in Google rankings when people are searching for your services in your area. Also, it is not necessary to publish your full address if you don’t have customers that visit, you can just specify the area you cover.
- Post about your site, product(s) or service on your Facebook page – ask people to share the post. Try and create content that people will want to share e.g. if you have an online store you could offer a time limited discount code. When posting on Facebook try and include a relevant image (possibly with your key message in text) or even better a video.
- Post to specific groups on Facebook. If your product or service is aimed at a particular geographical area or subject matter try posting in relevant groups (just make sure you stick to the rules of the group).
- Aside from building a following on Twitter and just posting to your own followers, use hashtags such as #UKBusinessHour (Thursday 8-9pm). This allows you to promote your business to a wider audience. There are lots of similar hashtags you could use. See https://www.spaceandtime.co.uk/voice/all-uk-twitter-hours-hashtags-updated-regularly/ for a comprehensive list of UK based hashtags.
- Post regularly. When you post on Facebook or Twitter, not everyone will see it as it may appear too far “down the page”. Also something may not be relevant to someone when it is first posted, but may be another time. Therefore I would suggest posting about your website regularly, but not so often that you annoy people (I would suggest usually no more that once a month unless you have a particular reason to e.g. a special event or time sensitive promotion).
- If your product or service lends itself to be photographed, try starting an Instagram account. You may find it faster and easier to create content for Instagram than for other social media. Try and use relevant hashtags so your posts are seen by more people. You can occasionally include mentions of your website.
- If you are aware of people on Instagram or Youtube with relatively large audiences who would be interested in your product(s) or service, you could try getting in touch with them to ask if they would be willing to feature or talk about your product(s) or services.
Let me know in the comments what works for you or if you have other ideas that could be added to this list.