Promote your site

When we say “Promote your site”, we mean, increasing the visibility of the site to the online audience. Your target audience needs to know about your existence online and more importantly they should be able to find you by searching. Unless these conditions are fulfilled , you will not have anyone dropping in to your site for a visit.

Techniques like Search engine optimization, Pay per click advertisements, Press releases, social media marketing, are some of the ways of increasing your site’s visibility online.

Much has been written about promoting sites on the internet, not only in this blog but everywhere on the internet. But it might help to know that even below you kick start your promotion strategy, you can do a few things to start preparing for promoting your site online.

You might be starting a completely new business online, or you may have an existing offline business, and like almost all businesses, you wish to have a presence online so that your customers can reach you through this medium. There could be hundreds of reason for your presence on the internet, but just being online may not be enough. For someone starting a completely new business that only has an online existence, promoting the site is completely dependent on the online medium unless you wish to shell out funds for offline advertising as well. It does help though. You may want to refer to “Launching a new website” for ways of promoting a brand new site.

For an existing business, you can make use of the goodwill that you already have in your offline business and generate traffic. The moment your website is ready to be launched, make sure your have printed your website URL in all your stationary, receipts, shop address, everywhere.Encourage your customers to visit your website. Give them pre-launch offers. You may want to offer to deliver products for free, provide a prize for the 1st customer who purchases from your website, and so on and so fore. There are various ways of encouraging and getting customers to visit your website.You might want to get a feedback from your customers regarding their experience on your website, especially your regular customers. This will give you some valuable insights and information.

Once you have a few visitors dropping in to your online store, you can start working on Search engine optimizing your website. Though for on-site SEO you need to start as soon as you have worked out the design concept. Web site structure, layout, content, and Meta tags need to be decided in the preliminary stage. A SEO specialist needs to get engaged right at the beginning so that you do not have to undo all the hard work later. Also, a short term PPC campaign will help this time. It will help get some visitors very quickly. The beauty of starting a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign is that you can stop it and start it anytime, you can decide the budget, and you can design customized landing pages for each of your ads!

Promoting online is a continuous process, a process that needs to keep up with the changing times. With social media now an active part of every net surfer’s life, it is now a necessity to include Social media as an important part of your strategy for promoting your site online.