What works best when promoting a new website?
What works best when promoting a new website?
I am ditching my old website and have just acquired a brand-new one (as of today!). Clearly, I would like to attract users to it, but am unsure how to direct my efforts to best effect. Should I go for search engine optimisation? Direct advertising? What has worked for you, and what has been a time (and/or money) waster?
For the curious, the new website is at http://www.welfordwrites.co.uk - there are a couple of glitches that I know about! The old website was at http://www.welfordwrites.com
Thanks!
Good Answers (11)
Philip S.
Business Coach at Minutecoach Business Coaching | PAYG business coaching
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Hi John,
The answers here cover a lot of ground, here's some other thoughts - written very plainly, I hope you don't mind.
1) The site is too content light to warrant enormous Keyword advertising and SEO, your time would be better spent out of Google once you have cleaned up the basic optimisation for natural search.
I'd go for networking and direct advertising, specialist publications, education and summer schools, foreign entrepreneur and trade groups looking to market/sell in the UK and Europe, etc. who may not wish to engage larger marketing firms, writer's circles and 'social' book publishers with communities like Lulu.
2) You've mentioned that people send you emails with content in to be proofed, you could add to the site's utility (and attractiveness) and your offer by using writeboards for collaboration and review or web form submission from the site. This can be done with free web 2.0 tools.
3) Although you have the usual home, about, customers, contact, in this instance it is diluting the important content, splitting up a message you could present in a single glance.
Here are its elements:
You offer 2 services proof reading and editing, at £9.00 per hour and hand indexing at £12.00 per hour.
You offer a free trial. (which people will get in your new site by filling a form, pasting in the text or uploading the file they want to trial - you need to set a limit - one page? and you need to find out the size of the actual job for planning).
You have many customer testimonials (that break into clusters on the page - English as a second language (inc. Internationalisation for other English speaking nationalities), Press and promotion, Technical hand crafted indexing.)
You have continuing retained clients in great relationships.
If I see this in 10 seconds on your front page, the only other thing I need is your phone number.
4) You should promote yourself as the business, as others have said, through professional membership directories (even paid - shock, horror!) where possible, as they will provide qualified traffic.
5) You might need to decide on who you are in your business persona. Your site is Welford Writes, but it continually refers to we, there is no picture, bio etc. to reinforce the personal craft side of what your doing.
Who is Welford?
If you are uncomfortable with a heavier personal edge then alter the site to have something like 'we are a small group of passionate....' and use more than one address cindy@, bob@ for different functions, whether they forward to you only or not.
Sometimes sites feel as though they are trying to bigger than they are, you work is specialised, I don't think you need to do that.
I hope that helps a little, Oh, and you need to alter the last 't' on the menu at the bottom of the pages (unless it's intentional!)
<a href="contact.html">contac</a></span><a href="contact.html"><span class="style5">t</span></a>
to:
<a href="contact.html">contact</span></a>
Philip
Clarification added October 12, 2007:
Actually, that's one of the glitches you mentioned isn't it - and I'd put the span outside of the link too. Oh well, It's just too early in the day to be making any sense whatsover...
Clarification added October 12, 2007:
I could have used your services on the answer I posted - 'your/you're', 'you work', and others. Just shocking...
Angela H.
Chief Creative Officer & CEO at Incitrio, Branding and Web Design Agency | creative solutions for global clients
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It all depends on the age of your industry, competitiveness of keywords, budget, and average sale. Search engine optimization is great if your industry is new. Pay-per-click is great if your industry is established. A combination is ideal if you are selling online. Direct advertising only works if you use it in combination: banner ad on highly targeted site (acquire), combined with custom landing page to highly targeted customer archetype (convert), combined with custom html newsletter (retain). However, unless you are able to completely customize based on one specific target audience, direct advertising will only work as a branding vehicle and become one of your touch points in an 8-10 touch point sales cycle. So, I would recommend optimizing your site based on 6 keywords and getting yourself listed in online directories for services that are directly related to yours. Email me if you'd like me to send over some case study examples for SEO vs PPC: angela@incitrio.com.
Mia K.
Owner, KosmaCom
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Hi, John. What is your target group? Foreign students or companies? (I had a quick look at your website, and understood that your services are mainly aimed at foreign students.) If foreign students are your target group, I would try to do some direct marketing/advertising in different student associations and universities.
You might also want to consider adding some free content to your site; this always attracts visitors. Perhaps some instructions on how to improve one's English or something like that? Or maybe a blog that deals with the English language and/or writing?
You could also start SEO by adding some keywords. I had a look at the HTML code of your page and noticed that you are not using any keywords in the <head> element. All you need to do is add a line like this between <head> and </head> in your HTML code:
<meta name="keywords" content="proofreading, writing, John Welford, writer, proofreader, English, another keyword, yet another keyword, and so on"> (see link for more instructions).
Hope this helps!
Links:
I'd begin with article marketing within targeted blogs (industry and/or personal) plus SEO/SEM. PPC would work initially, but it does get to be expensive. You can target Long Tail keywords for SEO which I've found brings in more KPI conversions than all other tactics combined.
Linda
Marty M. F.
Helping my clients grow their business and make more money
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John,
Click the link below for an article from Electronic Retailer called "15 in 30", which are 15 great website promotion tips you can do in 30 minutes or less.
Cheers,
Marty Fahncke
Links:
Biana B.
Consultant
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John,
Congratulations on your new web site! Since you are a service provider, here is a web site marketing plan I recommend for service providers:
- Define your target market. Who are the people that you want to come to your web site? You need to know exactly who you want to come to your web site.
- Create a web site that speaks to your target market. Make sure that your web site explains to your target market the benefits of hiring you.
- Start a newsletter. Very few people who come to your web site will hire you immediately. They will need to take some time to get to know you and learn about your services and your expertise.
Therefore, you need to publish a free newsletter, to which your web site visitors can subscribe. You should use the newsletter to build relationships with your subscribers.
- Use online marketing techniques such as article marketing, search engine optimization, business blogging and others to drive traffic to your web site.
You should get my free special report, "Top Strategies To Get Clients Online" at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/free_report.html In it I discuss how to promote a web site online.
Links:
John, do you like writing?
Put on a nice blog with your site, get a couple of top notch posts and submit them to sites like digg, delicious and reddit. Try with something like "The most increadibly mistakes on a letter" or "If this is your CV, you will have a future at flippin burgers"
If you manage to grab the attention of those communities BANG, you will have loads of links and visitors coming.
This will allow you to get some exposure fast, while working on SEO and Link Development, that are indeed useful, but they take a long time (two, three months) to get effective.
Links:
All of the answers thus are very good! I'll take it one step further and suggest that you yourself are the best way to get your site marketed. In fact, just by asking this question on LinkedIn you got atleast seven people to look at your site! Pretty good for not even trying! I suggest you make sure you have some good analytics installed - Google Analytics will do if you want to go for the free side of things. Then, follow up on some of the suggestions here especially those about blogging and article marketing. Then start promoting that content through stumble upon, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Do some Google research to find blogs and forums specifically on your topic, and start commenting and participating in the conversations.
As you do this, constantly look at your analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. When you hit on something that generated a bump in traffic, identify what you did, and repeat it!
Keep in mind as you do this, you'll be developing a natural pattern of backlinks to your site, and thus you'll be doing a portion of your SEO at the same time.
David E.
Philippines Business Consultant at Dayanan Business Consultancy
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I don't know why you decided to move to a new domain. But you should have visitors to your old domain redirected to your new domain. Using a 301 redirect. Other tips to be better indexed in the search engines: Add meta tags (description, keyowrds) at least those. Add a keyword to the page title. Add Alt Img Tag to images.
Research keywords. Think like your customers what keywords would they use in search engine to find you.
Advertise where your customers are.
Links:
Ivan S.
Director at JobsBoard.ie
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Day 1.
Research your competition – you probably know all about them already. See who is linking to their web sites – email them with a link to your new site, and a request to link to you. You can even put a bit of a PR spin on in like: “our new site addresses the needs of today’s <your_user_type> by providing <benefits_your_site_provides>,...”. You can use any SPAMy software to do it, or you can do it manually.
Blogs,
Write your own blog. With your new Site as a No. 1 most important news on it. Make almost every blog post explain one benefit of your new site. Host the blog under blog.yournewdomain.com.
search for blogs that link to your competition, comment their post, and point to your site and it’s benefits. Link to your site in other peoples blogs. They will blog about your site sooner or later. Be nice, ask questions. Suggest improvements on their blogs. Compliment! SMILE!
The above will ‘cost’ you one day. And that is what your first day should be. Wherever you plan to go next...
Ivan
PS. All the best!!!!!
Links:
Teresha A.
Marketing Manager and Owner, InfoActive Media
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I don't think search engine optimisation is an option. It should be built into the site itself by making sure the site is easy for spiders to get around (it is, so well done there), has a lot of content (could use some help here), unique title and meta tags per page (needs doing). Once that's done what else you do will depend on your budget and time allowance. A blog might be a good idea for you but only if you have the time. Articles might also be beneficial but again, it's very time consuming. Just like anything else, they can be a waste of effort and money if not properly targeted. I honestly wouldn't even think of doing anything else until your site is fully optimised.
And I agree with David, you need to make sure your old visitors still find the site without causing yourself any duplicate content issues - use the 301 as he suggested.
More Answers (3)
Maurice W.
SEO Engineer at Reed Business Information
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re Mia's sugestion meta keywords are all but worthless now. Having unique meta descriptions per page is usefull as is targeting the page title with keyphrases.
Interesing service ill have to book mark it in case we need that sort of thing ive been optimising some pages rote translated from german which is fun.
Thanasis T.
SAP SCM Consultant at Real Consulting S.A.
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I think that the best option is to find out the rules specified be the best search engines and follow them. This will make them appear in a higher position at the search results.
Except from the free way, another option is to pay relevant companies to perform the promotion of your website...
Adam K.
Principal, Studio2a
Best Answers in: Graphic Design (2), Business Development (1), Small Business (1), Starting Up (1), Computers and Software (1), Software Development (1)
There is a lot of specific advice here, but the best advice I would give is:
Good useful content will promote your website faster and cheaper than you can.
You are a writer, so writing page content shouldn't be that hard for you. I would also question why you are leaving the .com .... why not keep both (make them different)? More content.
