Deep into the internet age, it’s rare to find someone who doesn’t run their own website: whether it’s as a freelancer, to promote their hobby, or for their business. In fact, with over 70 million new posts being published on WordPress each month alone, is it any wonder that blogging, content and digital marketing have become core tenets of the modern marketer’s strategy?
At least 65% of content marketers report operating with a fully-fledged, documented marketing strategy to push their websites, and drive traffic toward them. That means that for the rest of us out here, trying to grow the popularity of our site among our intended audience, we have our work cut out for us.
Which is exactly why we’ve chosen to write this article: to give you 11 tried-and-tested, simple yet effective methods to teach you how to promote your website successfully in 2023. By the time you’ve finished reading, we’re confident that you’ll have picked up the necessary know-how to take your site – be it blog or online store – to the next level.
Method 1: Start a Blog
In some senses, blogging seems so 2000s, doesn’t it? Back in the golden days of the internet, when blogs and forums were about all that existed, and Tumblr ruled the waves. Certainly, blogging has its roots in the personal opinion pieces posted to sites like Tumblr, but today is a roaring industry more attuned to the needs of businesses who wish to increase traffic and conversion on their main site.
Starting a blog requires a little research and a little planning – research into the competition (what other people in your industry are writing about), and planning to ensure you produce and post content regularly, accurately, efficiently, and in-line with Google’s SEO rules. However, once you’ve got your blog off the ground, it can serve you as a sort of customer honey-trap: they come looking for advice and information, and are afterwards redirected to your website.
Method 2: Utilize the Power of Social Media
Source: DataReportal
Social media has changed a lot, too, since the Naughties. The originators of the manic, attention-demanding apps we all use on a daily basis now – Bebo, MySpace, MSN Messenger – were geared much more heavily toward the ‘social’ aspect of social media. Whereas, today, apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok – ‘The Big Four’, if you will – are more akin to very cleverly-disguised advertising tools.
For anyone hoping to learn how to promote their website, this is good news. There are currently over four billion social media users alive and active, meaning that over half of the entire world’s population has an account on at least one social media platform. The ideal audience for your website, therefore, is out there somewhere. By using the power of social media to reach out to, connect with, and post content for other people to watch, you can organically grow your website and your customer or client base at the same time.
Method 3: Submit Your Site to Online Directories
Submitting both websites and blogs to online directories is typically one of the most cost effective methods of growing your site. Oftentimes submitting your site to online directories is completely free, and requires little more than your time. By submitting to directories, you build up a portfolio of places linking back to your website, which over time can help internet users find your and consequently increase traffic to your site.
Online directories are split into three major categories: search engines, paid website directories and paid blog directories. Submitting your site to search engine directories like Google, Bing and Yahoo! is essential to ensure your site’s success, whilst submission to paid directories should be approached a little more cautiously. Do your research and make sure that the paid directories you’re looking at are accessed by your target audience – if they are, go for it! This is a great way to generate authentic interest in your site.
Method 4: Post on Forums like Reddit and Quora
One thing you need to keep in mind about the internet is that it is unimaginably vast. Sure, 130 million people may use TikTok on a daily basis, but what about the other 3,870,000,000? There are almost more places (sites, platforms, directories) than there are internet users, meaning that it’s important to be as broad and diverse as possible when casting your website’s net.
Another great way to promote your website (and one which is entirely free) is to become something of a keyboard warrior. Get yourself on Reddit, and search for subreddits relevant to your industry or niche. For example, r/accounting or r/accountinghumor are the two biggest Reddit communities accountancy firms should be eyeballing. Once you’ve found your chosen subreddit(s), carefully read the moderator’s rules for posting before crafting posts which add value to the community’s members’ feeds, but which simultaneously link back to your site.
Forums serve similar purposes. Take Quora for example – a site where anyone can post any question and receive answers from the wider public. Search for questions which you – as the expert in your niche – can answer, and link back to your website with each answer posted.
Method 5: Do Guest Blogging
You can’t go it all alone. The internet, as monopolized as it has become by the financial mores of capitalism, still harbors some degree of the community it was founded to foster. One of the fantastic community elements to the internet is found in guest blogging. Guest blogging refers to the practice of writing a piece for someone else’s blog, which they may (or may not) feature.
If you can follow the rules, tone of voice, content quality and style established by the sites you’re targeting, you can increase the chances that the content editor there will opt to select your writing for publication. Typically, one of the biggest perks of guest blogging is that you can include in your post one or several backlinks to your own site, or to posts you’ve written for your own blog, thus effectively exposing a whole new readership to your site.
Method 6: Content Marketing with Quality Content & SEO
Content, or so they say, is king. Just take a look around you the next time you find yourself on public transport or… well, honestly? Anywhere in public. Everyone is on their smartphone, and everyone is consuming “content”. ‘Content’ is a catch–all term for consumable digital media. Its most recognisable form is the meme, or short clip – i.e. a very visual type of content. However, content can also include blog posts, music tracks, TV episodes, podcasts, and so on.
Because we love consuming content, via social media or entertainment platforms like YouTube, we have of course also worked out how to market it: by including affiliated links in the content, or referencing things – in this case, our website – which we want to promote.
Content marketing to promote your website requires you to focus on two things in particular: quality and SEO. Look at what’s trending, what’s hot, what sells, and break it down so that you can apply similar features to your own, original content. Next, research SEO best practices to ensure that the content you produced is optimized for search engines like Google.
Method 7: Use Email Marketing
Source: Oberlo
Just like we almost all use social media, we also almost all find ourselves absentmindedly checking our personal and work emails on a daily – if not hourly – basis. Email marketing capitalizes on this habit by sending relevant, enticing and useful emails to people who have signed-up to our website or newsletter.
Just because someone may have chosen to enter their details the first time they purchased something from your store or read one of your articles doesn’t mean that you now have a new loyal customer or client. Email marketing is a way of reconnecting with this score of lapsed potential, and encouraging people to revisit your site. Just remember to keep your email content brief, to the point, and engaging – you want people to click on your links, not delete the email out of boredom.
Method 8: Syndicate Your Content to Online Communities and Aggregator Sites
‘Content Syndication’ might sound complex, but it’s actually just a fancy way of saying: “Repost your content on as many different sites and platforms as possible.” Remember what we said about posting to sites and forums like Reddit and Quora? There are as many people on the internet as there are places for them to hide.
In other words, in order to maximize your site’s potential for growth – to ensure that the maximum possible number of people see and interact with the content you produce – you have to publish each piece of content across a broad spectrum of websites, social media platforms, blogs, forums, and the like.
Method 9: Get Featured in Newsletters, Reviews or Podcasts
Trust is a fundamental, yet often elusive element to digital marketing. Trust sells, because when a potential customer trusts your brand, they are much more likely to both engage with it and stay loyal to it. But trust is hard to come by, especially when we all have advertisements thrust in our faces about three thousand times a day.
Thus, the best means of gaining trust is to leverage the word and recommendations of others. If you can manage to get featured in newsletters (physical or email), reviews and podcasts, then you’re allowing someone else to say: “Hey, look at this person/company/brand, I think they’re really worth checking out, what do you think?” If the person talking has already built a loyal following, then you can expect to see a serious return in terms of traffic to your site.
Method 10: Repurpose Existing Content for New Channels
Wonderful though it would be, no one single content medium is applicable nor appropriate for all channels. A clear example would be to take a blog post: on its own, it is only useful as content for your or other blogs. It’s too long for a newsletter, too wordy for an Instagram post, and in altogether the wrong format to be uploaded to YouTube.
To learn how to promote your website is to learn how to get the most out of your content by repurposing it according to the channel you’re sharing it on. Let’s take that same example from above. Once you’ve posted your article to your blog, you can repurpose it for YouTube by producing a video highlighting its key points; for Instagram by designing a visual post with a key quote from the piece; and for an email newsletter by distilling the original post into a few key paragraphs.
Method 11: Focus on Evergreen Topics and Regularly Refresh Your Content
So we’ve learned that content marketing is a key part of how to grow your website, but how on earth do you decide in the first place what content is worth curating? Well, a good start is to focus on ‘evergreen’ topics as much as possible. ‘Evergreen’ content is any content which is not limited by a specific time, place or event – content which will, theoretically, still be of use and value to the reader/viewer/listener decades from now. Evergreen content is less likely to result in an immediate spike in traffic to your site, but is the type of content which brings more people over time.
Regularly refreshing your content is perhaps equally important. Information, opinions, and advice can all change as the world does. A post from four years ago on “How to Use H2 Headings in SEO” is liable to be less useful than another post on the same topic from four months ago. Keeping your content updated and refreshed keeps it at the top of the SERPs pile.
Conclusion
The good news is that there are simply heaps of effective methods you can use to successfully promote your website in 2023 and beyond. Best of all, most of them are completely free! Sure, promoting your website takes time and energy, but it’s also an integral part of keeping your business or hobby healthy and growing.
If you establish a concrete plan, allow for some flexibility in it, and take time to research best practices and the competition in your industry, we’re confident you’ll be able to tackle the demands of promoting your website without a problem.
Thank you for reading this list of 11 effective methods for how to promote your website. Keep it bookmarked, and share it with your friends to make sure that they, too, have the tools necessary for website promotion. Good luck, and get blogging!
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