Marketing For The Purpose Of Getting Website Traffic
Website marketing is an important aspect of site ownership. Building a simple website is easier today, but marketing for website still remains a challenge even among long-time site owners and well-established webmasters.
Just like having a store, having a website requires online advertising and promotion to let the public know of its existence. But unlike the street stores that are able to get walk-in clients from passersby, your website can only get visitors by letting others know about it and send them straight to your site.
Main Goal of Website Marketing
All efforts made for marketing and promotion of the site are aimed for only one goal, and that is traffic. This is the lifeline not only of the website but of the online business as well, in some cases.
All websites need visitors. Without viewers, the purpose of having a site becomes void. That is why marketing is part of website ownership.
Ways of Marketing a Website
Despite the challenges of marketing a site, it can be fun while productive at the same time. There are many ways of promoting websites. It is best to check out some of the most effective techniques and strategies, and choose the methods that fit well to your interests and expertise.
But before going straight to aggressive promotion, it is important to know that there are two different aspects of marketing. These are the internal marketing and the external marketing. These two must be carefully implemented for better success rate. Take one out and you won’t achieve the same level of success that you will attain if you execute both aspects of marketing.
Internal Website Marketing
This is an onsite promotion to your visitors by giving them valuable contents. As the saying goes ‘content is king,’ it applies well for onsite marketing. You have to provide valuable contents that are quite compelling enough to make your visitors hit the ‘buy’ or the ‘add to cart’ buttons in your website.
For many online marketers, this may refer to the landing page or the sales copy. But aside from that, you must also provide valuable information devoid of sales statements.
People love to get some tips and advice; some are seeking for guidance and help in solving certain issues. Whatever that applies, your site must be able to offer the information that most visitors want. This is an important aspect in converting visitors to clients, and achieve good conversion rate.
External Site Marketing
The other aspect of marketing is the off-site promotion. This is a crucial part in getting website visitors. Some of the common effective techniques of website marketing are as follows:
Free methods:
- Article marketing- a simple technique yet effective in getting good amount of traffic. Just write articles related to the niche where your site belongs and submit these articles to different article directories. You must ensure to make the content very valuable to the readers so that they will follow the link to your site in the resource box of each article. In the past, many marketers used to submit the same article to various directories. This technique is no longer recommended today, especially with the recent updates in the algorithms of search engines like Google. For best results from this strategy, make sure to submit unique articles to each article directory.
- Forum marketing – another effective method is indirect marketing of your website in related forums. Some forums allow their members to post some links to their site via the forum signature. Every time you create a thread or make a comment in the thread, your link will be shown to the other members. Just like article marketing, if you provide useful insights and valuable advice, other forum members will click on your signature links to check out your site. Another excellent benefit of using this method is that you will not only expand the online exposure of your website but also improves its search engine ranking because of the good-quality backlinks you shall be creating along the way.
- Social marketing – one the best and more popular ways to market your site is social marketing, particularly in social sites like Facebook and Twitter. These famous social sites have hundreds of thousands of members. You can market your site by asking your fans to check it out for its interesting and helpful contents. In Facebook, you can create a fan page that gives you a rare chance of interacting with your fans and recommend your website to them. Success in this method is directly proportional to the number of fans. Hence, get more fans and you will also get more visitors to your site.
- Social bookmark marketing – Bookmark each page or post in your site in some popular bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg. Just like social marketing, you must also build more followers to obtain better exposure of your site.
- Video marketing – If you are fond of watching and submitting videos in YouTube, turn your passion into an income-generating past-time by converting your articles into videos and upload them in YouTube. Don’t forget to add the link of your website at the end of the video. The more views each video gets the higher traffic your site will also obtain via this method.
- Email marketing – This method works well if you have a long list of subscribers to your regular newsletters. Recommend your site to your email list and you will get significant surge of traffic via email marketing.
Paid methods:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Cost-per-action (CPA) advertising
- Banner ads placement
You can choose from the above marketing techniques in getting high traffic to your site. The free methods can help you get more targeted visitors without shelling out a penny from your pocket; the only investment you need is time to implement these strategies. However, if you don’t have much time but you can spare some bucks as investment for your marketing campaign, then go for the paid methods that produce faster results.
In addition to these strategies of marketing for website, there is another option to boost your traffic; which is to buy targeted visitors to your site.