7 online ways to publicise your website

A website is the most essential marketing tool for every new business in 2008.

It used to be vital to get business cards when you first started. But now it’s more important that people can learn about you and your business online.

It takes time or money to get your website perfect ,and having invested that time, you’re sure to want a good flow of traffic as quickly as you can. Traffic means interested people which should mean sales leads.

Here are seven proven online ways to publicise your new business website.

1) Buy traffic

If you need visitors now – today – the only guaranteed way to do that is to buy traffic by advertising online. The UK’s two major search engines Google and Yahoo! both run adverts next to natural search results. Booking these adverts is deliberately easy. You tell them which keywords you want (which search results you want your adverts displayed next to), the rough location of your customers, and how much you want to spend (which can be as little as a few pounds a week). Everything else is done for you automatically.

It’s called Pay Per Click (PPC), because unlike traditional advertising you only pay when someone clicks on your advert. Broadly speaking, the position of your advert depends on how much you are willing to pay for each click. As with natural search results the higher the better. When your budget has been spent, your advert disappears.

Getting the best return from PPC requires time to optimise your campaigns. Google for example now picks the order of adverts not just on how much advertisers are willing to pay, but on the performance of the adverts. Those that get a better click-through rate are displayed higher. This helps Google show the most relevant adverts to your search.

You can get started with Google AdWords at very low risk with a free £30 online voucher from Bytestart.

2) Get more links to your website

A cheaper but longer-term way to build traffic is to get lots of links back into your website. Speaking very simply, Google assesses each page on your website and gives it a score, called a PageRank. Although the jury is out on the correlation between PageRank and search result rankings, it is well worth your while trying to get to the PR4 level or beyond. One of the ways you can improve your PageRank is with relevant quality links to your website.

Forget all the “quick fixes” to building links that you’ll see online… the best thing to do is build up a bank of them yourself over time. Take part in business forums, visit relevant blogs and add comments. Don’t just try to sell your products or services, add some value to the website you are contributing to. But make sure you always have a link to your website in your signature.

You can also build valuable links by buying positions in online directories. The key thing with links is relevance. If you sell shoes online, you want lots of links from other sites where shoes are relevant.

Also, don’t forget the social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. You can create content among groups of friends that will give you links, and can also spread to your friends’ friends. And on sites like Squidoo you can show your expertise as well as create links.

3) Write free articles

One of the best ways to shout about your website is to write articles about it. Content websites like Bytestart sometimes accept original content from experts. There are also many articles websites and free PR sites that accept press releases. Some perform very well in Google searches. Remember to stick to writing about your expertise only.

If you can’t write for toffee, find a writer to help you. There are plenty online, or you could even approach a journalist from your local newspaper and see if they fancy earning a bit of extra cash.

4) Send emails

Your new website MUST have the ability to collect the name and email address of visitors, so you can send them simple newsletters. It’s an easy way to encourage repeat visits. It’s also worth looking at buying lists of emails, especially if you are targeting a niche sector or geographical area. Find out how old the data is before you buy it, and remember when you buy lists you have a much lower response rate (these people have not given their permission to hear from you, so are less likely to respond)

Remember to keep your emails legal. Always ask permission before signing someone up to your list, and make it easy for them to leave. You should focus on excellent email content to keep people on your list.

Consider investing in proper email marketing tools that will let you monitor how many emails bounce, who opened theirs and when, and how many people click through. By studying how different content performs in emails, you will soon work out what content your readers prefer.

5) Spread a virus

Ever accidentally spent a whole night looking at videos on YouTube? Or wasted hours playing a simple online game?

It’s called viral marketing, as the message spreads by itself. Creating a video can be easy and cheap. It’s vital that it has a surprise or makes you laugh – otherwise it won’t be recommended by others. Here’s a great example from Ford – they couldn’t show this on TV, but it spread like wildfire on the internet.

Fun games are more expensive but can become a real talking point as an entire office competes against each another. When games support a message, such as with this one to help save sharks, they become a powerful weapon.

6) Get aggregated

The key to publicising your website online is going where the traffic is. Google News UK is the 32nd most visited website according to Alexa.com. And you can normally get your website featured in there by writing a press release and submitting it to a quality news wire. It costs but is a good investment exposure.

Other aggregators worth targeting are Digg.com, StumbleUpon etc, where readers decide the story order by voting. It’s a true democracy of news, and getting on the front page of Digg will give you serious traffic.

7) Grow your website

A really powerful long-term strategy is to invest time in your website each week. Think of it like a house plant – if you never pay it any attention it will whither. Whereas if you care for it every week it will thrive.

Get in the habit of rewriting pages regularly, adding links, checking for broken links, and more than anything adding new pages. Start a blog, add articles, encourage discussion. Google loves a website that’s updated regularly and constantly adds new content. So don’t let it down!