Online promotion is the need of the day. Whether it is a website, a product or a service promotion plays an important role in selling and increasing footprints, sale or clicks. With the ever increasing competition in online world, promotion of websites has become very important to stay abreast with the competition and get more clicks and visitors.
There are many ways to do promotion like SEO, SMO, SEM, Social Media Promotion, Blogs and Forums etc. but each of these activities is necessary to increase traffic to your website. There would be a time when traffic from one kind of activity has reached its saturation, so understanding and implementing another type of strategy becomes important. In this guide, I would be covering various ideas, tips, tricks and step by step proedure to do online promotion of a website. I would be taking an example here and will go through various implementation steps in detail.
Identify Website
First of all, identify the website and theme of website which you would be promoting. After identifying your website for promotion, check which part of website you are going to promote (as websites could be very large as well and you need to promote only certain service or section).
After identifying website, identify theme on which you would be working. For an example here, we would be taking http://babynames.kunals.com website. This website is an information portal for Baby Names with their meanings, origin, numerology along with baby related resources. And theme for this website would be Baby Names primarily and would also cover baby care, baby resources and parenting. Here, we would be using various promoting pages, sites, blogs and forums which are related to these themes – baby names, baby care and parenting etc.
Research for Competitors
Find out who all are your competitors. Look out for main keywords for your website. Here it could be baby names, indian baby names (in case your site is country specific) etc. Now, for these keywords perform a search to check out competitors and see what all they are offering. What META description, title and keywords they are using. You can get some good ideas from this and can further research on keywords using free tools available like Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Know various ways of Promotion
- SEO – Search Engine Optmisation
- SMO – Social Media Optimisation (or Social SEO): Adding of social media content like like, +1, RSS feeds, user reviews,user ratings, user polls, video, content sharing etc.
- SEM – Search Engine Marketing: Increasing visiblity by paid methods like paid ad placement and contextual advertising
- SMM – Social Media Marketing: Promotional activities in social media inlcuding blogging, micro-blogging, commenting, forum discussion etc.
- Bookmarking: Stumbleupon, Digg etec.
- Articles: Writing Articles – Squidoo, Ezine Articles
- Blogging: WordPress.com, Blogspot.com, Blog.com, Tumblr etc.
- Micro-blogging: Twitter etc.
- Blog Commenting: Related and relevant blogs
- Forums Discussions: Related forums, posts, topics
- Group forming: Formation of groups on social networks, communities, forums etc. Taking part in interest groups like Google Groups, Facebook Groups
- Videos: Promotion using videos, uploading messages, thoughts as text videos or creating and sharing some little animated clips like on Youtube, Facebook
- Social Sharing – Sharing of links on Social Networks and bookmarking sites
- Chatting – Talk and Sharing on chats, groups chats
- Gadgets and Widgets – Creation of useful gadgets and widgets applications like on Conduit, Alexa toolbar, iGoogle
- Mobile Apps – Creating mobile applications for various platforms like Android, Symbian, Bada, Windows etc. either by coding or available tools like Conduit
- Directory Submissions – Submission of sites on various web directories by choosing categories like DMOZ
- Blog Submissions – Submissions of blogs to blog directories like google.com/blosearch
- Classifieds – Submitting sites as ads to classifieds sites
- Search Engine Submissions – Submitting your site to various search engines
- Article Submissions – Submission of articles to article submission sites
- RSS/Feed Submissions – RSS submissions to rss directories
- News Announcements – News publishing
- Press Releases Submissions: Submission of Press releases about new features on PR sites
- Gadgets and Widgets Submissions: Submission of gadgets to gadget directories like iGoogle, Yahoo
- Link Building
- Link Exchange, Link Sharing, Back Linking, 2-way Linking, 3 way-linking
- Mobile Apps Submission: Ovi Store, Android Market, Conduit Market
- Wikipedia
- Answers: Yahoo Answers, askpedia etc.
- Content Sharing – PPTs, Tutorials like slideshare etc.
- Marketing: Email Marketing
- Marketing: Referral/Affiliate Marketing
- Marketing: Content Marketing
- Marketing: Mobile Marketing
- PPC – Pay Per Click
Identify ways of promotion (applicable for your website)
After specifying various ways of promotion above, we need to identify promotion ways which would be applicable for our site Baby Names. Following ways would be applicable:
- SEO – Search Engine Optmisation
- SMO – Social Media Optimisation
- SEM – Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media, Social Networking
- Bookmarking
- Articles – Writing Articles
- Blogging
- Micro-blogging
- Blog Commenting
- Forums Discussions
- Group forming
- Social Sharing (Bookmarking)
- Chatting
- Directory Submissions
- Blog Submissions
- Search Engine Submissions
- Article Submissions
- News Announcements
- Press Releases Submissions
- Link Sharing, Back Linking, 2-way Linking, 3 way-linking
- Mobile Apps
- Apps Submissions
- Classifieds
- Wikipedia
- Answers
- PPC
Plan and Strategy making
Plan-out from where you need to start, for Baby Names we would start with following:
- SEO
- Directory Submissions
- News Announcements
- Press Releases and Submissions
- Answers
- Search Engine Submissions
- SEM
- SMO
- Blog Commenting
- Micro-Blogging
- Bookmarking
- Classifieds
- Article Writing
- Article Submissions
- Forums Discussions
- Social Media Promotion
- Social Networking
- Chatting
- Group Forming
- Social Sharing (Bookmarking)
- Blogging
- Link Sharing, Back Linking, 2-way Linking, 3 way-linking
- Mobile Apps
- Apps Submissions
- Wikipedia
- PPC
Prepare
- Content rich site – Content is very important and your site must have content. A site without content stands no where.
- Learn about SEO Quick Tips on this post.
Implementation
- SEO – Make your site Search Engine Friendly. Follow various steps on how to make a website SEO friendly.
What else to know
- Study Google Analytics
- Study Google Webmasters
- Google Page Rank
- Web Trends – Google Trends
- SERP
- Automatic Bookmarking
- Lenses on Squidoo
- PPC
- Google Adwords
- Rank Checker
- W3C Validator
- HTTP Response Header – http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php
- Domain Age