Whatever business you may be starting, you simply cannot afford not having a website. Clients need to know about you and be able to contact you at any time. Do you have a website already? Great! You took the first step to success. However, there is one more thing:
In other words, there is no point of going online if you are not willing to invest either time or money or both in promotional ammunition.
However, whether you are a blogger, a startup, an SME or anything other than a corporation, chances are that you don’t have cash for a dedicated marketing team and grandiose marketing campaigns. But don’t worry, there is still hope. It’s all about being curious and creative.
So, let’s take a look at a few online marketing tricks that you can use in order to make your website famous.
1. Make people to find you easily
People will find you if they notice you. However, appearing on the tenth Google result page will not make you noticeable. Google traffic studies show that more than 9 in 10 users would not go past the first result page.
You, therefore, have to work on your search results visibility. Google Adwords is a paid option allowing you to advertise yourself and rank at the top of search pages for specific keywords. Although this process can highlight your website within a short period of time, it can turn out to be an expensive solution.
Alternatively, you may consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It includes all the techniques helping you to improve your visibility among the search results, as Google calls it – organically, and without investing a single penny in Google AdWords.
This process can be achieved through two complementary focuses:
- On-page SEO, which determines for what topic you rank for, given the keywords you included in your website’s content
- Off-page SEO, which arbitrates your ranking given a specific topic, based on how many websites link back to your webpage.
Making people find you is about making yourself visible, appearing on the first results pages is essential
Pick and use the right keywords (on-page SEO)
Once you came up with a topic for a new page or post, think of the main keywords related to your subject. Consider favoring long-tail keywords in comparison with short-tail ones. They have a higher word count and, as a result, hardly benefit from a large search volume.
However, they are more specific and you will have a better chance of matching up with the visitors looking for you. Conversely, short-tail keywords are certainly very popular. But this is precisely why they will affect your visibility as they are subjects to higher competition.
Think of it this way. The topic of this article is directly related to ways to promote WordPress websites. We could, therefore, set up “website” as a tag since we know it is an often-typed keyword in search engines. Nevertheless, millions of topics are directly related to websites.
How to create a website? What is a website? How can I speed up my website? Ranking top 10 here is mission impossible! However, if we could end up choosing longer-tail keywords such as “how to promote my WordPress website”. The number of searches would drop, yes. But: the relevance of my keywords would increase and amplify the potential number of clicks. Cool, right?
So, now that you have picked the right keywords, you should try as much as possible to squeeze them in your title and subtitles, meta description and image titles. To this extent, Yoast is undoubtedly a must-have plugin for WordPress. It will provide you great advice to improve your on-page SEO.
Foster backlinking (off-page SEO)
Backlinks involve other websites linking back to your website. The Google ranking of your web page depends on two elements.
- The popularity of the website that backlinks to you: phrased simply, a very reputed and high traffic website that links to one of your pages will give you a great SEO boost.
- The relevance of the backlinks obtained: the search engine will try to spot similar keywords between the two web pages. The more similarities there are, the better it is.
As for Wiredelta®, we would fulfill these two criteria if websites such as wpbeginner.com or wordpress.org, that stand as solid references for WordPress users, backlink to Wiredelta® and this article.
Now that we know what backlinking is, the question is how to make other sources mention your content? Unlike on-page SEO, you do not directly have off-page SEO under control. We will, therefore, see further how to generate word-of-mouth.
Also, do take into account internal backlinking. Referring to existing content on your website in newly published pages is one way to do so. People may be interested in pursuing the reading on your website and, as a consequence, increasing its popularity in the eyes of Google.
Optimizing your website
Though it isn’t a live-or-die criteria as the two previous ones, Google did declare that the loading speed of your website impacts the search result rankings.
As it also happens to be one of the main concerns for user experience, it is definitely worth paying attention to it. Picking the right hosting solution, optimizing your images, using caching plugins are various moves you can take in order to improve your website’s performance.
2. Create high-quality content which:
- is related to your audience’s field of interest,
- encourages people to promote it, either on your own website or on social media.
With these two conditions in mind, you will be able to spur your visitors’ enthusiasm!
Quality content is imperative:
If you want visitors to come back on your website and share it
Be understandable
This is so basic that you may not even think about it. However, you should bear in mind that what is crystal-clear for you might not appear the same for your readers. Show empathy for your audience who does not necessarily share your expertise.
On the one hand, make sure you explicit the technical terms you may be using. On the other hand, focus on your readability. Using short sentences and paragraphs, bullet points, subtitles and transition words will make your ideas more legible for your readers. You can also consider creating infographics. It is currently a trendy way for gaining in clarity and a good idea for social media purposes. If sharing an article through a link is nice, sharing a picture is even better as it will appear in its entirety in the feed.
Be relevant
Write topics people are keen on hearing about. So what makes a subject interesting?
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your content related to people’s activity or passions?
- Did you check whether it is a trendy topic?
- Is it to some extent controversial?
A way of verifying whether some topics are popular is to take a look at your website’s statistics thanks to a tracking plugin. What are, for instance, the most read articles? Google Trends is also a great indicator. Type a keyword and you will see how searched it is over time.
Google Trends is great way to assess keywords’ popularity over time
Be useful
You’ve got your topic. Awesome. Nevertheless, the thinking process is not totally complete. Building quality content involves one last thing: being useful. Can your readers actually exploit your writings? Not only should you ask yourself “what” is interesting but also “how” is it interesting.
Be concrete, use examples, share your experience and other people’s stories. Your readers will relate and show some enthusiasm for the solutions you propose!
3. Generate interaction and word of mouth
You have so far done your best to make your website visible and relevant to your potential visitors. Great job! Keep up the good work while now also focusing on more active and interactive communication!
Make your content more accessible
People tend to forget things if they are not reminded constantly about their options. They may have read your blog post and found it great. However, what makes you so sure they will come back? Offer to your visitors the opportunity to subscribe to a newsletter so that they can regularly be reminded to consult your website. If you keep on producing quality content, there is no reason why your website should not gain any traffic.
Check out SumoMe or similar interactional plugins. Creating customized pop-ups will encourage your visitors to subscribe and enable you to start building a loyalty relationship.
Promote through social media
Developing social media tactics is a key element to your website’s communication strategy. BUT: bear in mind you require a game plan. Do NOT create social media accounts because it is trendy. Go for it if you have a concrete idea of what approach you want to have and how relevant it is going to be for you. Being present on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ does not mean you exist and have an audience. Think of it this way, people can be your customers, however, can they be your fans?
Once again, your success depends on a smart content strategy. How can you spur engagement and therefore enhance people to visit your website?
Here a few hints you can work on:
- Relevance: always relate to some extent to your activity,
- Boldness: you are allowed to be funny and provocative,
- Real-time: no point posting a great joke on April 2nd.
Social Media are a great way to demonstrate your company’s personality and, therefore, spur curiosity regarding your activity
But community management does not limit itself to content creation and writing skills. Also, take planning into account. How frequently is it relevant to post? What is the best time of the day to do so? Do not neglect to listen to the reactions of your audience.
Whether they are negative or positive, they provide you with great feedback of how your company and its communication are perceived. A great way to improve your services and therefore your website. At last, do not forget to measure. Do more people follow you? No. Then change your strategy. Yes? Define what makes you successful and list best practices.
Eventually, building a resourceful social media strategy will increase the consideration that people have for you and drive traffic to your website!
Get individuals to talk with and about you
As mentioned earlier, listening to how people react to the content you publish is a must. Now answering is even better. Whether it is a tweet, a Facebook post or a blog post comment. It proves you pay attention to your customers. As long as the conversation goes on, more people can join it and/or demonstrate interest by liking, sharing etc.
You can even go further in terms of proactivity. Participating into Q&A websites, contacting bloggers and journalists, etc. are steps you can take to increase your influence.
Indeed, getting opinion leaders in your industry to talk about you definitely helps you build a reputation. As well as improving SEO since people mentioning you will surely backlink to you. There we go, we now have a virtuous circle!
Conclusion
Having a restricted budget does not necessarily mean that you cannot promote your website. So no excuses now. Building a communication strategy is a long-term process so you’d better start boning up as soon as possible. You may also be interested in our plugin guide. Many of them have great promotion features that could suit you!
Being a startup with limited resources, Wiredelta definitely faces communication challenges as many other small businesses. Nonetheless, we recently came up with a great conversational tool for our clients and anyone interested in CMS’ problematics. Go and have a chat with our AI assistant on Messenger. It is available 24/7 to answer any question!
