Effective Ways to Promote

Your Website, for FREE!

Creating a nice, professional, and attractive website and/or marketing page is the basis of your marketing campaign. But that does not translate to getting traffic and conversions.

Think about your reason for creating a website, most likely your goal is to attract visitors and convert them into potential customers. But if you fail to attract anyone simply because your website is not visible, all your efforts will be put in vain.

“But I only have a limited promotional budget.” Well, luckily not every promotional effort requires tons of money. And this is what we will be discussing today, ways you can promote your website and materials for free.

HOW CAN YOU EFFECTIVELY PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE

Blogging & Guest Blogging

There are so many companies selling the same product and service, it is important to find a way to stand out and not become the “one of the many” companies out there. One way to achieve that is to get people to trust your business.

Reliability is what people are seeking these days.

Blogging is definitely one way to go, this is how you show people that “you know your stuff”. If people see the value in your content, they are likely to share your content. Hence, further expanding your content reach.

As you establish your voice within your industry, you can also try reaching out and write for other websites. This is what people call “guest blogging”. You are essentially tapping into others’ audience base, and potentially attracting and bringing them over to yours if they find you interesting and reliable.

Having relevant and good-quality content is the first step of your marketing strategy. Once you think you have enough content, your next step will then be focusing on how to reach a wider audience group.

Email Marketing

You’ve probably been receiving a lot of different marketing emails, especially during the holiday seasons (thanks to Black Friday + Cyber Monday + Christmas, my daily routine included deleting tons of emails). This is called “email marketing”.

This is one of the most effective ways to keep your customers updated with your business. It could be about:

• Launching new products
• Sale Day promotion
• Update on product features
• Company updates, etc.

Source: Close

People are most likely be checking their email regularly (or even daily). The likelihood of them coming across your content via email marketing is much higher than going directly to your website. People don’t just go to a website without any reason.

Giveaways

Like many people, the thought of potentially winning something for free (monetarily) incentivizes people to do something. You can often see these in “giveaways”, a kind of promotional offer from a company to increase customers and leads. 

Giveaways come in a variety of forms, but the most common one includes giving away prizes to a randomly selected winner out of a pool of entries. Companies usually require people to provide basic content information such as name and email address to participate in this event. This pool of entries will become potential leads and it is up to how you would want to make use of this opportunity.

Infographics

There are two major reasons why you should create infographics:

1. Add colors to your content, making it visually more interesting
2. Helps to explain the complex idea and/or data, so users can easily digest such content
3. Good quality infographics are more likely to be shared by others

Check out Venngage‘s infographic on surveyed marketers’ visual content strategy in 2020:

The above two images are actually parts of a bigger 15-part infographic, but Venngage has also separately created these smaller ones to make it more shareable. (Like what I’m doing right now!)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is probably the very first step you need to take to effectively promote your website. The higher the website ranking you have, the more visible your website is to a general audience. 

There are three areas in SEO that you need to focus on—On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. All are equally important, they all serve their purpose.

On-page SEO → Concerned with optimizing the content IN your website for search engines 

Off-page SEO → Refers to everything done OUTSIDE your website, such as social media marketing

Technical SEO → Focuses on adjusting the structure of the website

Social Media Marketing

Everyone uses social media, no marketing strategy is complete if you exclude this. What’s best about social media? There are already billions of users on each of these platforms. By using the right strategy, you can easily tap into billions of existing users.

One important thing you need to take note of: there is no one-size-fits-all approach when using social media platforms. For instance, what you type on LinkedIn is likely to be different from Twitter. Mainly due to (1) word count limit, and (2) different purposes and user types on both platforms.

Source: Adobe LinkedIn – Relative formal tone

Source: Adobe Twitter – Short and sweet

Source: Adobe Instagram – Relatively similar to Twitter, but with more space to add more details

Quick summary

Marketing doesn’t necessarily mean spending a huge amount of money to promote your website. With the correct tactics that best suit your needs and capabilities, you can potentially even spend as little as nothing! 

Here’s a quick summary of effective ways to promote your website for free

1. Blogging
   Establish your voice and build credibility through producing quality content, and expand your reach by guest blogging
2. Email Marketing
   Higher possibility for your customers to come across your content via email since they are more likely to check their email regularly than to visit a website without reasons 
3. Giveaways
   Gather leads through giving out prizes via promotional events
4. Infographics
   Add colors to your content and create highly shareable content
5. SEO
   Adjustments made to make your website rank higher in search engines
6. Social Media
   Additional channels to promote your business on platforms with billions of existing users