Small Business Websites

Website Promotion Methods

Written by Charles Mburugu for Gaebler Ventures

If you build a website, visitors will automatically come. No, they won't! Building a website is not sufficient. No one is going to visit the site if there are no links to it anywhere. The site will not even appear is search engine listings without some incoming links. You will need to do some promotion in order to get some traffic. What web promotion techniques can you use to increase traffic?

The purpose of a business website is to attract many visitors who will hopefully buy a product or a service. The following are various website promotion techniques which you can use.

Web Directories

These are the basic elements of any promotion campaign. Though they may not generate much in terms of traffic, they will boost your site's search engine ranking. There are many free, search engine friendly, non reciprocal directories which you can get listed in.

Pay Per Click Advertising

This refers to advertising such as Google's AdWords. However, if you are not careful, it is very easy to spend a lot of money without returns with these services. Adwords, for example, allows you to select a maximum budget a day. Though $5 may not look like much, it will add up to $150 in a month. Make sure you correctly identify keywords, and preferably ones that are not highly competed on. In addition, make sure your sales copy is well-written.

Don't just target traffic, target quality traffic

Everyone is concerned about getting more traffic to their websites. Traffic, though, is easy to obtain. Manual hit exchanges, purchased traffic and autosurfers will all direct visitors to your website regularly. However, this traffic is only visitors, most of who will waste your bandwidth with no returns. Unless you are being paid well for pay-per-impression advertising, such as popups and banners, this traffic can be absolutely useless.

Repeat traffic

Unless you need visitors to visit your site only once to purchase a one-off product, and the sales copy is good enough to hook them on the first visit, you will want visitors to return to your website. If there is nothing valuable in your site, visitors may come only once, but will not return of their own accord. Normally, it is estimated that a potential customer will have been exposed to a product seven times before making the decision to buy.

Reciprocal linking

Though somehow frowned upon, and generally not considered as useful as one-way linking, an appropriate reciprocal linking promotion can be a vital traffic generating method. Swap links with related, but non-competing, sites. Linking with your competitors is not wise since visitors may end up buying from the competitor, especially if their product or website appears better than yours. An example of non-competitive linking is a webhosting site linking to a site that sells programs and scripts. Some web directories would also be willing to swap links.

One-way linking

This is one of the best forms of link for Search Engine Optimization purposes. There are several ways for getting one-way links. The simplest is to submit to the free web directories. Another way is through writing articles relevant to your industry or site, and posting them on ezines or directories. Make sure you include a resource box at the bottom with a link to your website. Most ezine publishers and webmasters need fresh content and will publish articles for free.

Charles Mburugu writes for us from his home in Nairobi. He has a graduate degree in Business Management from Kenya Institute of Management. He is interested in writing about branding, CSR and intellectual property.

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