Website Promotion

The Website Promotion Process

This process is all about how you get qualified visitors to your website so that you can sell your products or services to them. A qualified visitor is someone who has an interest in what you have to sell. If you don’t have qualified visitors you can’t grow your business. So how do you qualify your visitors?

Keywords

On the web visitors are qualified using keywords. Keywords are so important that we need to take a moment to review what they are and how they are used before continuing with the details of website promotion. Lets start with a definition:

Keywords are the search terms that users enter into search engines like Google when they are searching for something. Keywords are usually typed in as a phrase rather than one single word. They can be broad like “Dog Training” or more specific like “Dog Training Classes Oxfordshire.”

It is important to note that the term keywords refers to single words and phrases. The following are all referred to as keywords:

• dog

• dog training

• dog training classes

• dog training classes oxfordshire

The longer keywords such as “dog training classes” are also referred to as keyword phrases.

Choosing Good Keywords

We have covered what a keyword is but how do we choose a good keyword to use on our web pages or to search for something we are interested in? Lets answer this question with an example:

Lets Suppose for example that we are selling the following course: How to Learn HTML. In order to promote our course we need to first identify who is going to be interested in learning HTML. Then we need to identify what keywords they are likely to use when searching for a HTML course.

We might decide that one group of people who are interested in our course are budding Internet marketeers who have decided to build their own sales pages but who do not know html. So we have identified our first set of potential customers or prospects.

Next we need to find out what keywords they will use. For instance they might search for “html course,” or if they are in a hurry they might search for “learn html fast,” and if they have no previous experience they might search for “learn html fast and easy.”

This is just an example but you can see that by thinking about our prospect and putting ourselves in their shoes we can come up some ideas for good keywords.

In order to assist you in finding good keywords there are many techniques and tools that can be used. For example you can start by brainstorming a list of keywords, or you can use a commercial tool like Wordtracker. Wordtracker also has a free keywords tool at Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. This will tell you how many times a particular keyword or phrase was actually used in the past month on certain search engines. Wordtracker also offer a free email based beginners course on keywords.

Tip: Keywords are very very important and choosing the right keywords will greatly help your business efforts - you need to get good at this together with Pay Per Click Marketing (in the next section)

Website Promotion Objectives

Lets get back to website promotion after our detour into keywords. When promoting your website your key objectives are to:

• get qualified visitors to your website

• turn those visitors into customers, and

• make more sales to returning customers

The more qualified the visitor (prospect) the greater the chance of making a sale.

Tip: You should be spending about 70% of your time promoting your website. In my opinion this is the number 1 priority activity of any online web business.

There are many ways to promote a website and we could easily fill a 1000 page book with details but three of the top ways to promote your web business are:

• to run a blog that promotes your business

• search engine optimization

• pay per click such as Google Adwords

Lets look at each of these in turn.

Run a Blog Related to Your Business

Blogging has become very popular and many people believe that blogging is the top way to promote your website. A good blog will attract visitors in many ways and it is generally much easier to add content to a blog than to a website. As mentioned earlier a good blogging option is Wordpress. You can either register for a free blog at www.wordpress.com or you can host your blog with a hosting company like Dreamhost or Hostgator.

Wordpress has developed into a full blown Content Management System so can you can host a website and a blog at the same time. This gives you the best of both worlds. You can create pages for you website and the automatic blogging facilities of wordpress make it easy to add blog content to your website/blog.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is probably the most traditional way to attract visitors to your website. One of the key SEO strategies is to choose keywords that will attract the right visitors to your website and then optimize a page on your website for one or more related keywords. Linking is also a very important SEO strategy. This is covered in more detail in the SEO section.