5 Simple Strategies for Online Website Promotion

Do you want to take your business to a new level online in 2011? I’ve met with quite a few business owners already this year who share similar goals. They want to learn and implement the best ways to market their businesses online. There are many strategies out there, that many of the people I speak with have tried but had no success usually due to one of the following reasons:

There are many strategies out their promising the world and very rarely deliver. I get a flood of them in my inbox daily. Would you trust a SEO, spammer guru that promises to make you rich quickly and with no effort? I wouldn’t either. Online marketing can be a confusing topic, particularly with all the dodgy schemes being constantly released.

That’s why I have written this article outlining the 5 most effective and simple website promotion strategies you should consider for 2011.

With website promotion, there is not one single online strategy that will produce everything you need it to. Online success requires a range of strategies to be implemented regularly.

Here are five strategies I would suggest to most business owners:

Strategy 1 - Create a detailed marketing plan

Do not start marketing your website until you have created an online marketing plan. This plan should set goals and objectives and outline how your visitors should interact and respond to your website. For example, once someone visits your website, how will you turn them into a customer? Maybe you need to capture there details for future marketing. Maybe they can buy online on the spot. Maybe you want them to phone you. Before you start promoting your website to increase traffic, invest your time and effort into a website that functions as a marketing tool for your business. While you can make your own internet marketing strategic plan, it’s often easier to sit with an expert and brainstorm your strategies together.

Strategy 2 – Online videos marketing

Video is the way of the future online. Not long ago, video was not possible for your regular small business. That’s all changed with improved internet speeds and the likes of YouTube, and other video hosting sites that make it easy to add and use videos online.

For this reason I suggest using video marketing as part of your strategy. Web searchers are now relying more and more on videos in their search for information and they are known to share videos they like.

Your videos don’t need to be a polished, major production. They can be straightforward, useful information for your target audience. You could also use video for powerful testimonials or demonstrations.

If you go to the effort of making videos, you should use them throughout the various free video website such as YouTube and MetaCafe among others. It’s a quick and easy way to extend your reach and increase the traffic to your website.

Strategy 3 – Create information products

Identify the needs of your target market, and produce information that solves their problems. It’s a good idea to publish the content as articles on your website. These articles should increase your website traffic and give you a chance to see what kind of information is most popular. Once you have a series of articles, compile them into an ebook. This is a great way to strengthen your authority in your niche and makes it easy for your target market to use of your information.

Place your contact information as well as your website URL in your ebook before distributing it online. That way people who download your ebook will recall your business as the experts, even if they don’t contact you immediately.

Strategy 4 – Build relevant backlinks

Building up your backlinks is an effective method to gain more traffic to your website. There are many methods to build links. This include social bookmarking, sharing articles through Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon and social networking such as Twitter and Facebook. Just be aware not all links were created equal. Links from websites related to what you do and with high Page Rank are the best but the most important thing you need to watch for are ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ links.

Nofollow links are links to your website that have been programmed to not pass on any PageRank credit to your site. They still may be helpful to increase your traffic however it’s the ‘dofollow’ links you should aim to increase. That’s why forum posting, blog commenting and article marketing are often the best ways to build up backlinks. Many of these do use ‘dofollow’ links.

Strategy 5 – Write Articles regularly

Be consistent in coming up with fresh, unique, informative and high-quality articles. These are not just for your own website, you could also use them to spread the word about your business by submitting them to article directories such as buzzle.com, goarticles.com, articlebase.com and ezinearticles.com. You will reach a broader audience this way plus, get the added bonus of building your backlinks in the process.