Here’s a snapshot of some creatively scrappy underdog methods for business website promotions that don’t rely on the instability of search engines.
Search engine rankings fluctuate all the time either when Google update their algorithm, or when sites competing for the same keywords are published. It is nice to get this type of traffic, but you must regard it as bonus traffic rather than your bread and butter.
Relying on a single web traffic source such as search channels goes beyond being a bit of a problem โ it’s business and marketing suicide.
Use the “hub and spoke” promotional model, where the website sits is the centre of your business universe with different channels on the periphery, almost like a spider’s web.
Here are just 9 ways of many, many possibilities to promote and drive traffic to your website.ย
1. Online Directory Listings
There are dozens of high quality online business directories you can submit your business to free.
These often appear high up in search results, and is one way to promote your business, simply because it’s possible to piggy back on these websites to indirectly rank your own website.
Don’t confuse the good directories with crappy. low quality SEO link farms.
Directories like Yell.com still rank high in search for certain keywords, but be sure to have a spreadsheet with all your login info and which directories you submitted to.ย
2. YouTube Videos
YouTube videos are another way to market your business and website.
Create short videos introducing yourself, explaining what you do, and for who, and advertise your website address.
The best videos on YouTube are educational, informative and entertaining, and tend to do quite well in search engine results, as YouTube has a high domain authority.
Videos can be embedded into accompanying blogs or articles, or even added to your main pages.
3. Newspapers, Magazines, Flyers, Printed Business Directories
Advertise your business website in the classified section of the local newspaper.
Use QR codes to encourage people to scan the code and get targeted traffic over to your website.
Direct print mail as a marketing channel is still alive and well with the opportunity for great integration with your website. This will cost money to do, obviously, so take a good look at your site before paying to promote it in this way.
4. Customised Business Cards
If you’re giving business cards to people, they’re an excellent miniature advertisement for your site, especially if you are at networking events where certain topics are sure to come up and for which you’ve prepared content as part of your marketing funnel.
If I were to get talking about graphic design logos and all the funny mistakes I’ve seen out in the commercial world, I might slip the card below to the person I was talking with so they can see for themselves.ย
If I were to talk about website page architecture, topic clusters and the typical “silo” or “drilldown” principles, the card below with a direct link to a 10 minute video would be an excellent supporting prop to back up my in-person explanation. Get it?
5. Email Signature
Your email provider will give you the option to insert a “signature” automatically into the footer of all your emails.
You should customise this as well as you can.
Do not insert too many images, because replies to messages will actually fill up all the space in your inbox!
6. T-Shirts, Uniforms, Apparel
Don’t forget to use branded clothing as a way to advertise your website. Ideally, you’d use a very short URL rather than some of the stupidly long ones I see on all kinds of print material.ย
7. Company Vehicle
Do you have a company vehicle? Can you have some graphics and the website address added all sides of the vehicle?
It’s a billboard with wheels.
8. Audio Recordings
Audio recordings are a passive, easy to listen to format. Podcasting has been on the rise for some time, but you might not want to commit to a fully-fledged ongoing series, and just want to instead do a couple of one-off recordings to convey messages.
You can use audio to tell your audience important details, give tips, explain your services and provide value.
On top of all that mentioning your website at the beginning and end reminds them where to find you.
Soundcloud is free to use, offering 180 minutes total recording time, which, when split across multiple recordings is quite a bit. That adds up to 18 ten minute uploads, which, of course, can be embedded on your website in the same way as YouTube videos.
9. Voicemail
Why not mention your website address in your phone voicemail greeting, or encourage them to do a Google search and read some reviews? Keep them interested in your business rather than losing them just because you couldn’t take the call.
If your website content is any good, you’ll be using it to publish FAQs, blogs, articles and more to disseminate important information and possibly reduce the volume or length of calls in the first place.
Those were 9 ways to promote your website but the reality is, there are hundreds of methods for driving targeted traffic to a site. Be clever and creative, and think about how you would do this if your life literally depended on it.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and if you partner with someone who can help you with the technical implementations, you could be running circles around competitors in the most subtle of ways.
