When trying to promote your website, you really have to constantly think about "Why would someone come to my site?" And, "Why would they stay on my site?" Deliver on that. Put that user value proposition first and foremost in your website promotion strategy. Watch the video to learn more about how to promote your website.
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Hello and welcome to our video on how to promote your website. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer with me as well.
Good afternoon, Chad. This is a fun topic. People jump on our forum all the time asking how to promote my website. I really want to get out there.
I think for you I this could be a fun discussion because it's going to pull us back a number of years. You remember those days. You're just getting started online. You're trying to figure out how to get audience, how to get traffic or maybe sell a product or a service.
So you're at the very beginning of your website promotion. You're just trying to figure out how to do it.
I know we made a lot of mistakes. I know I did. Spent a lot of time laboring over just each little activity and each link I might be able to land and each forum I could join. So I thought we'd try to give some of these introductory viewers some lessons when they ask how to promote my website.
Great question, and I do remember those days. So I think the first thing you want to talk about is the audience that you're trying to reach. So a lot of people are going to start thinking, well I really want the search engines to refer me traffic. But in a way that is the secondary audience. And I think more and more as we evolve the state of SEO with website promotion we really are focusing more on the primary audience being the person and the secondary audience being, of course, the search engine.
So you want to start with content marketing. We've talked about this many, many times. But you want to think about, what ideas and information can I create and then get on other websites that will allow me to earn links back to my website? And those are places like you mentioned, participating in forums, or commenting on blogs, in some cases.
In other cases when thinking about how to promote my website you might actually want to write a whole article or blog post that you offer to another website in return for them mentioning you and your website. So basically the idea of taking information you know and syndicating it out across the web is really a great way to promote your website.
So you're saying, Chad, and I'm sure people watching this have heard this before. The content comes first and the usefulness comes first. But we know that's not what people want to hear. They're thinking, hey, I want to promote my website and I've read about all the traffic that can come from search engines or I've heard about it from a friend. Or maybe I've done a little keyword research and seen the numbers myself. And so they follow into the trap up of the SEO becomes primary and they lose sight of the usefulness.
You're saying, don't let that happen. Even though that's ultimately where you want to be, it's ironic and subtle. And the website promotion beginners have a hard time with this concept. You've got to keep the audience and the value proposition of why someone would come to your website first on the list. And ultimately the search engines will find that.
Exactly. And I think the second place you want to make sure you're taking advantage of it, especially today, is social media. Because social media, again, is going to do two things. One is that it's going to create and find an audience that's interested in your information and that you can participate in. But then it's also going to send some social signals about either the content that you're syndicating on other people's websites or that you're posting and publishing on your website.
And so, again, that social media isn't necessarily, you will get some audience value directly from people finding and reading your information and then coming to your website. But there's, again, a secondary benefit, that it's interlinking all the things you're doing which is going to help when we talk about the next part of it.
Right and so people think, oh so I'll put out a tweet and a bunch of people will see it and, boom, I'll have some audience. No, it doesn't work that way. But including social media as part of your strategy to get out there and really promote yourself and get your website found is an excellent way, as Chad said, to pick up a few readers. Try to syndicate your stuff. Just try to generally circulate and get out there so people can find you.
Right. So then if you've done the first two. If you've created great, compelling content and you've done your job of finding good places to put it and get your message out on the web. And you've also then reinforced that with social media, the secondary audience, the search engine is going to see all that activity. And then that's where you're ultimately going to come up in the search rankings on certain terms that are relevant and you'll get traffic.
So, again, you're getting that primary benefit of the audience of everything you're doing. But then you have this kind of second customer, this secondary audience, the search engine, who is watching everything you're doing and ultimately going to find your content and move you up in the rankings on those terms.
And it is a magical thing when that happens. Because you see those traffic spikes and you get really excited. And, of course, that's why people are here. They want to do website promotion They've read about it. They've researched it.
So just to recap, don't skip over step one. You really have to constantly think, why would someone come to my site? And why would they stay on my site? Put that user value proposition first and foremost in your promotion strategy. Because if you're trying to promote a website that has no value, you're going to be frustrated and you're going to waste a lot of time.
And lastly, I think the last point I would make, Chad, is you need to recognize the enormity of the internet. I think we've passed 500 million active domains. That's half a billion. SEOmoz is reporting 700 trillion individual links on the internet. So you really can't labor and obsess over each one of these activities. No, you can't send out one tweet and expect anything to happen.
You need to be tweeting constantly, every day. Likewise you need to be looking for other places to find an audience. You need to be syndicating. You need to be in forums. You need to be blogging. And if all of it is around this base of having excellent content that people actually want to use and share, those activities will ultimately have an excellent return for you and your rankings will fly as your promotion.