The 5 Pillars Of Web Site Promotion
If the only way your web site can go is up - then it’s time to seriously promote your web site on the internet.
What I learned from talks with fellow entrepreneurs is that many business people who’ve had a business web site for years still have no clue on how to make it successful.
They don’t have much visitors; and the few who come to their web site don’t turn into customers. A visitor shows up, clicks, leaves, and is never seen again.
This is not what you want, right?
Successfully promoting your web site is neither hard to do nor is it a hidden secret nor is it expensive.
In the upcoming months I will show you dozens of strategies you can use to get targeted traffic to your business web site.
- What makes the difference between a successful web site promotion and a failure?
- What if you had a simple plan, a guiding principle, to promote your web site from zero to hero?
Having A Successful Website Does Not Happen By Accident.
Instead it is something that you can plan and then achieve easily step by step.
You’re guaranteed to turn your site into an internet marketing success if you commit to the 5 Pillars Of Web Site Promotion and do a few simple steps on a daily basis.
How To Build A Solid Foundation For Your Marketing Plan.
Just like building a house, building a successful web site requires a strong and solid foundation. Your success cannot be built on something ethereal, you want to build a house to last.
So before taking any promotional action you need to be clear about the overall goal or your web site.
Read again: do not take any action unless your 100% clear about your site’s goal and your targeted visitors.
Don’t take this lightly. It sounds so obvious and simple that most people rush over it and never really think about it.
But you should.
I’ve had dozens of consultations with business owners who ignored that advice. These are the people that say internet marketing doesn’t work.
And they are right.
If you put up random web sites without a goal and a plan you set yourself up for failure. But that’s true in any area in life, isn’t it? Taking action without a plan and a goal just doesn’t yield much.
Here’s your chance to get it right. Print this article out and then write down the answer to these questions:
- Who exactly is your ideal visitor? Where do you find these people online? At first you might find it hard to be precise about that. You may be afraid to leave people out and reduce your chance. Actually your chances of success will increase if you narrow your target.
- What do you want your visitors to do once they come to your site? What is the primary goal of your web site? Sure, you do not want to leave them for good. But what do you want? And how do you make them do what you want them to do?
The answers to that will be your guiding principle whenever you’re not sure what to do next and what to focus on.
It sounds more complicated than it is.
But you’ll never figure it out unless you write down your goals and start taking the appropriate actions.
Once you know your goals and your ideal visitor you can implement a step by step internet marketing plan.
The 5 pillars of web site promotion represent 5 topics you should use on a daily basis to make your site successful.
Taking little steps each day will be much more profitable than doing a huge and expensive marketing blast in one week and then do nothing for the next 12 months.
Continuity builds success.
That’s why you rather do 15 minutes a day. The little actions you take will build up like compounded interest in your bank account.
So What Are The ‘5 Pillars Of Web Site Promotion’?
At first glance it might seem a lot - but if you take it one step at a time all will come easy and natural to you. Here you go:
The first pillar of web site promotion: Getting back links to your site. That’s really important. The more back links you can get to your site, the better. Ideally try to get links from sites that match your site in topic. So if you have an internet marketing site, you don’t want too have all your links coming from sites about golf or dog grooming.
Why?
- Visitors from a related site are more likely to click through to you.
- Search engines like Google will give more weight to that link if the site’s topic matches yours.
What else do we have for your ‘promotional consideration’?
The second pillar of web site promotion: Email Marketing. I hate to break it to you, but let’s face an ugly truth here: Unless you capture their email address 99 from 100 visitors leave your site for good.
They did not buy, and they will never come back.
The way to turn this around is email marketing. Get your visitors email and permission to email them with marketing messages.
Here are a few benefits of capturing your visitor’s email:
- You can send out promotions for your own products and services to increase sales.
- You can send out promotions for affiliate programs and earn commissions.
- You can point your your readers back to your site and thus create repeat visits.
Now if you manage to drive new visitors to your site for free, you’d have a killer marketing strategy funneling your free traffic into your email promotions. Getting free web site visitor’s is what the next pillar is about.
The third pillar of web site promotion: Search Engine Optimization. 85% of all visitors arrive at your site through a search engine. So they did a search, for example with Google. Your site came up at the search engine results page (SERP) and the visitor clicked through.
The more often your site is at the top of search engine results pages, the more free traffic you get.
That’s why you should optimize your site for the search engines. The process is called ‘search engine optimization’. In short it means that you optimize your site in a way that makes it relevant for specific search terms people might use. Let’s say your site is about ‘the 5 pillars of web site promotion’. When someone enters that term in a search, then you would want to see your site at the top of the search engine results.
About the 5pillars … ah, well, it’s not something people are likely to search for … I know that. ;-)
You can learn more about search engine optimization in this blog’s category ‘search marketing’. Now let’s see how to make humans and search engine robots fall in love with your site, it’s pillar #4:
The fourth pillar of web site promotion: The amount and attractiveness of content on your web site. Search engines as well as visitors love regularly updated and content rich web sites.
After all: why would someone come to your site twice if there’s noting new to discover. On the internet we’ve become information junkies.
- People browsing the net are looking for information.
- They are looking for sites that provide value.
- They are craving new content all the time.
That’s why it’s easy to put your competition to dust.
Most of them treat their web site like a business brochure that is rarely updated. Take advantage and post fresh and useful content. Your visitors and the search engines will love it, come back often and refer your site.
The fifth pillar of web site promotion: Promoting your web site with paid advertising. This is the fastest way to get targeted visitors to your site: placing ads on other web sites and offline in print magazines and news papers.
The crucial point of course is that it costs money to place an ad. Unless you already have a marketing budget you should start to set one up. Or- if you’re dead broke - your paid marketing will have to wait till you made some money. It is however an area not to be neglected.
There’s no other means of online marketing where you have that much control about who gets exposed to your promotion.
But since it’s costly: better make sure your web site converts visitors to buyers before running a campaign. When running an ad campaign keep track of cost and be sure to stop it if it generates a loss.
So those are the 5 pillars.
Remember our building analogy?
There’s a final piece missing to build your house - the roof of your successful web site promo.
Let’s Top Your Success - With A Roof
The final piece of your marketing plan is ‘Measure Your Success’!
You do not want to waste your time and effort and money on any activity that doesn’t pay off. So measure what works and what doesn’t. Then expand what works and discontinue what doesn’t.
How do you do it?
Well, first of all get yourself a software to track what visitors are doing on your site. The easiest way to go is Google analytics.
Technically it’s a tiny piece of text that will be incorporated in all your pages. Then the analytics software will track what happens on your site.
A site analytics tool will show you useful information like:
- how many visitors come to your site
- what pages do they look at
- how long do they stay
- where do they leave
- etc. etc.
So there you have it, the foundation, the 5 pillars and the roof.
That Finishes Our Picture…
Here You Have It, The Step By Step Plan For Successful Web Site Promotion.
1. Before you start promoting decide who should come to your site and what action you want your visitor to take.
2. Work on improving all 5 pillars for your site. You could for example invest 15 to 30 minutes each day on 1 of the pillars. If you follow through from Monday to Friday you’ll be amazed. You’ll see your traffic grow and people coming back to your site again and again. Example:
- Monday: 30 minutes link building.
- Tuesday: 30 minutes to improve your email marketing.
- Wednesday: 30 minutes to SEO one page on one of your sites.
- Thursday: 30 minutes to add fresh content to one of your sites.
- Friday: 30 minutes to place an ad through PPC, E-zines, or print advertising.
3. While building your traffic and working on the 5 pillars, monitor what’s happening on your site. Put more time, energy and money in promotions that produce results. Stop promotions that do not produce results.
Remember: Continuity Builds Success! Follow through with such an easy plan on a day by day basis and you simply can’t fail.
You’re guaranteed to see your traffic jump through the roof.