Cheap Ways to Promote Your Website
Looking for cheap ways to promote your website? It can be tough, but it’s not impossible to promote your website on the cheap… mostly it’s a lot of work.
Granted, there are dozens of advertising platforms on the Internet, but many of them charge a hefty flat-dollar amount, restricting its use to larger companies with deep pockets. But the good news is that there are other, less expensive ways to promote a website.
Actually, I think a more accurate way of phrasing this is to combine several free or cheap tactics into one effective strategy to promote your website.
If you are reading this, I’m assuming that you are indeed looking for cheap ways to promote your website. I’ve talked about how easy it is for the following tactics to wind up costing you a bundle in my recent post, “5 No Cost Ways to Promote Your Website and Why They’ll End Up Costing You”. If you’re not afraid of a little work combining these tactics can help you really drive some qualified traffic and secure above the fold rankings.
Search Engine Optimization
Let’s start off with the obvious. Duh, everybody knows when your website ranks high, you’ll naturally receive more traffic and greater visibility. It’s just that simple.
This involves performing on-site and off-site adjustments to encourage higher rankings in the search engines.
What you’ll need to do:
Alpha Bee Design gives a clear picture of the SEO process:
The Research.
Keyword research is the first step to a successful SEO strategy. Keyword research is one of the most complex components to get right and you whole strategy hinges on it!
The only truly free tool for keyword research is Google Keyword Planner. There dozens of ‘fake’ free tools out there, but to get any real insight you’ll have to pay for it.
Start getting competitive keyword ideas using the keyword planner. The next step is to actually do some searches on the specific topics you want to rank for. This is crucial, because what you’re not doing is simply throwing up some generic service pages with some super broad keywords. What you’ll want to do is really dig deep on topics related to your industry to see what articles keep popping up in the results while you search your topics. You will want to carefully asses those articles and then create better versions of them.
“Looks like Zenhabits ranks in Google for thousands of great keywords related to personal development. I wish I knew all the keywords they rank for, so that I could plan my own content and outrank them for these keywords.”
Ahrefs recently published a post that explains how to use their paid tool for this type of research very effectively. I know, you see how easy it is to turn free into not so free, but the article is still very useful.
The Writing.
“SEO copywriting is all about creating useful, compelling, and valuable content, which targets specific keywords so that other people will gladly promote it on social media platforms. This increases the authority and relevance of your content and improves its ranking in Google for the selected keywords.” ~Neil Patel
Check out These resources for tips on crafting great seo content:
- Tips of Crafting Evergreen Content
- The Nine Ingredients That Make Great Content
- Top Tips for Crafting Better Web Content
The Link Building.
Almost equally important as the content you write are the links you build to that content. Unfortunately, the content alone won’t get the rankings or the traffic. You’re going to have to knuckle down once again to get your content out there for people to like and share.
Reaching out to potential link partners becomes a whole new form of research requiring more tools and more time.
You can always promote your website at little-to-no cost through social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram are all excellent networks on which to promote your website. The secret to using social media for this purpose, however, is to develop a strong following of users. Unless people are actually interesting in following your social media account(s), posting content and promotional messages about your website isn’t going to be beneficial. So, try to develop a following, and then use social media to promote your website.
Tools like Followerwonk, a Twitter analytics tool designed to help you maximize your sharing on the network and identify prospects, users and influencers who are relevant to your industry become essential.
Once you’ve identified Twitter users you’d like to build relationships with, it’s time to connect your Twitter account in BuzzStream which will keep track of your social outreach and conversations with prospects and link partners.
Blog Commenting- By combining the above research tactic you can make your way to influencer blogs to begin a deeper infiltration into the influencer community. While it may not hold the same value as it once did, but blog commenting is still an effective, low-cost way to promote a website. Search for relevant blogs and drop meaningful comments in their posts/pages, leaving behind your own site’s URL. Most blog comment links are given the nofollow attribute, meaning they won’t carry much (if any) SEO value, but they’ll still generate direct traffic through clicks.
The Email Approach- Backlinko has made email outreach a science with their Skyscraper technique. You can read their in-depth approach here.
Summary:
You begin to see why Research, Content and Link Building are the key factors in getting your website to rank and why they all need to be part of your cheap ways to promote your website strategy. The best thing about all the hard work you’ll put into this strategy is that it’s timeless. You can write something today, and three years from now it will still be out there being viewed, shared, liked and linked to; which brings traffic back to your site.
