IN THIS CHAPTER

Co-promoting all your online properties

Using social media to route traffic to your site

Placing your site address on all your marketing materials

Harnessing the power of influencers

After you go through all the trouble (and cost) of designing and building a branded website, it’d be a shame if nobody visited it. Yet that’s often what happens. Small-business owners build great websites and are surprised when they get little to no traffic. Usually, nothing’s wrong with the site; it’s just that people don’t know (or care) about it.

Ironically, the tool you invested so much in to market your business and brand needs marketing. Visitors don’t show up magically; you need to lead them there. This chapter delivers ten proven methods to make that happen.

Treat Your Website as Brand Central

Imagine a bicycle tire with a hub in the center and spokes radiating out from it toward the rim. In a similar manner, you can use your website as your marketing hub and link it to all your other online properties: your blog, social media accounts, press releases, articles, white papers, e-commerce stores, and so on. You use all those properties to drive traffic toward your hub with the added benefit of increasing its relevance in the eyes of search engines, such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. (Search engines consider external links to a site to be signs that the site is relevant and of some value.)

Make sure that all your branding assets point back to your website hub, including the following:

• Social media profiles
• Any brand or business profiles or pages you create on social media platforms
• Your blog
• Any business directory listings, such as on Yelp
• Your business cards
• Your email signature (check your email client’s help system for details)
• Any marketing materials you send out, such as press releases
• Any content you compose or contribute to that’s posted on other websites or blogs

With multiple paths leading to your hub, your site becomes a bigger target for search engines, and you increase your website’s chances of being discovered.

Use SEO to Your Advantage

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique for improving a site’s search engine ranking by populating the content of the site with relevant words and phrases. SEO is used to generate organic traffic as opposed to traffic from paid advertisements.

When you build your website and as you add content to it, be sure to use relevant keywords and phrases in the following areas:

• Your website’s name, address, and title tag: The title tag is a descriptive element that’s hidden from users but can be read by search engines.
• Your website’s meta description: Like the title tag, the meta description is hidden from visitors but describes the website’s contents and mission to search engines so that they can index your site properly.
• All content you post on your site: Presenting content that’s relevant to visitors’ interests and that includes keywords and phrases enables search engines to determine the relevance of a website or specific pages when someone conducts a search.
• Headings (H1 through H6): Search engines check page titles and headings for valuable information that describes the contents of a page. When composing web pages or posts, use headings to label blocks of content.
• Image alt text: Alt text is a description of an image in words. If a visitor can’t view the image or chooses not to have the browser display it, they can still figure out what the image is by reading the alt text. Likewise, search engines use alt text to determine the nature of the content on web pages and in blog posts.

See Chapter 8 for more about SEO.

Don’t commit keyword stuffing — intentionally packing content and meta tags with keywords and phrases to manipulate a site’s search engine ranking. This technique is considered to be a form of spam and is likely to do more harm than good. Search engines penalize sites for this practice by ranking them lower or not including them in search results.

Deliver Content That’s Fresh, Relevant, and Valuable to Your Target Market

People and search engines love to see fresh content that’s relevant and valuable, so don’t create a static website that attracts more dust than visitors. Continuously populate it with valuable content — text, images, audio, and video. Make your site as interactive and multimedia as possible. Remove or revise old content. Add something new at least weekly.

One of the easiest and best ways to keep your site populated with fresh content is to add a blogging component. In most content management systems, such as WordPress, you can build a combination website/blog by adding a separate tabbed page for your blog. Posting a couple times a week is easy, it keeps your site fresh, and it encourages visitors to post comments that add an ever-flowing stream of fresh content to your site.

Promote Your Content on Social Media

When you develop a following on any social media platform, you can use it to drive traffic to your website. Whenever you post any new content on your website or blog, post a teaser on all your social media accounts where it makes sense to do so — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and so on — with a link back to the fresh content. Instead of having to generate traffic (which is hard), you simply redirect it from a site that has loads of traffic to your website. (See Chapter 13 for more about promoting your brand on social media.)

Keep in mind that social media is social. It’s not business media, marketing media, or advertising media. When posting any content or commenting on personal accounts, take a low-key approach. If you’re constantly pitching products or services, you’re going to lose a lot of friends and followers. People are drawn to social media to connect and share in a friendly, social environment. Your goal should be to enhance their lives, not your bank account.

Spread the Word via Email

Email is a great tool for driving traffic to your website, assuming that you have a respectable list of email addresses for receptive contacts. It’s likely to be far more effective than social media just based on the numbers. If you have a list of 10,000 email addresses, your message will go to 10,000 recipients. By contrast, if you have 10,000 followers on Instagram, your teaser post will reach only about 1,000 of them (about 10 percent, according to 2021 Instagram stats).

Here are three ways to use your outgoing email messages to drive traffic to your site:

• Include your website address in the signature of all outgoing email messages. (Check your email client’s help system to find out how to use its signature feature.)
• Whenever you post something new and of interest on your site, blast an email teaser with a clear call to action to everyone on your email list. If you post a blog entry, compose a brief description of it followed by a “Click here to read more” link that takes the recipient to the page with the blog entry.
• Offer an incentive. You might offer a discount on merchandise or a free cool sticker to the first 1,000 people who visit your site and confirm their visit by entering their email and mailing addresses.

Take Advantage of Guest Blogging

Guest-blogging is a two-way street that often benefits both the guest blogger and the host. Think of guest blogging as a late-night talk show; interesting guests draw viewers and boost the show’s relevance, and the show provides the guest increased exposure or a way to plug their latest book or movie. It’s a win–win situation, right? Well, the viewers also benefit, so it’s a win–win–win situation.

In the same way, you can benefit from guest blogging in two ways:

• Host a popular guest blogger on your blog. Having a popular blogger post something that’s relevant to your customers on your site increases your site’s credibility while potentially increasing your exposure to the guest blogger’s followers, especially if the guest blogger makes a point of posting about the experience on their own blog.
• Be a guest blogger on a popular blog. When you contribute to a blog, you definitely increase your exposure to the host’s audience, and you have the opportunity to leave them with a favorable impression of you and your brand. In most cases, the host will allow you to link back to your site, which drives traffic to your site while increasing its relevance in the eyes of the search engines.

Another perk of hosting a guest blogger is that the blogger contributes fresh content that you don’t have to create yourself. It can also increase the variety of content available to the community that follows your blog.

Engage with Your Visitors

Small-business owners often create great blogs and post exceptional content but fall short by not following up with people who take the time to comment on their posts. As a result, they lose a golden opportunity to connect with customers and prospects. Even worse, visitors who aren’t acknowledged aren’t likely to return and certainly won’t recommend the site.

If you’re investing in creating a blog and developing quality content, spend some time engaging with your visitors. Think of the blog as a party, and you’re the host. Your job is to go around and make sure that everyone knows where the food and drinks are and is having a good time. If you see someone who appears to be lost, greet the person, talk with them, offer them a drink, show them around, maybe introduce them to some people they might like. Don’t ignore them.

Post Useful Content on Reddit

Reddit, self-proclaimed as “the front-page of the Internet,” is a social news aggregator where members post, rate, and comment on content in communities organized around their interests. Community members are treated to closely curated selections of the top posts in each category, and they vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on posts based on their relevance and value.

A great way to use Reddit to drive traffic to your site is to submit quality content to a subreddit (a specific category) and link it back to your website. If you created an ecofriendly cup, and you plant a tree for every cup you sell, you can share the product and information on a subreddit that focuses on sustainable products. Used appropriately, Reddit can be a valuable tool for driving website traffic and extending the reach of your brand.

Go easy on the self-promotion. If you’re blatantly promoting your brand or using Reddit merely to drive traffic to your website without offering anything of value to Reddit communities, you’re likely to have your content flagged and your account suspended. An example of content that probably would get flagged by a moderator is a post that promotes a fashion business but offers nothing of value to community members.

Recruit Influencers

An influencer is a person who has the power to affect other people’s purchasing decisions as a result of their knowledge, authority, or position. You’re probably more likely to buy a kitchen appliance recommended by Martha Stewart than one recommended by Eva Mendes, who has stated that she has too much respect for food to spend time destroying it in a kitchen.

Influencers typically recommend products or brands, but you can also use them to steer traffic to your website or web store simply by changing the call to action.

An easy and inexpensive way to find an influencer is to monitor your blog and social media accounts for charismatic leaders and then approach them privately about the possibility of working with them to promote your product or service. You can also find professional influencers on platforms such as HYPR (https://www.hyprbrands.com) and Heepsy (https://www.heepsy.com). (See Chapter 13 for more about teaming up with influencers.)

Answer Questions on Quora

To establish yourself as an authority on a product or service, consider answering questions on Quora, a platform where anyone can ask and answer questions. You can link your answers back to your website or blog to increase traffic and grow your own following.

When you create a professional Quora profile page, you have the opportunity to include your website’s URL (address), specify the market your business serves, list your qualifications, and link to projects or social media properties you want to promote.

Be highly selective about the questions you answer. Start by searching Quora for topics in your area of expertise. Then look for questions that have lots of followers, lifetime views, and answers or questions that have a low quality rating. I’m talking thousands of followers and in excess of hundreds of thousands of lifetime views. You want to answer questions that have the potential to drive hordes of people to your website or blog.