So, you’ve just built a website for your brand new business or personal brand… Fantastic! Successful websites are a great way to allow you to make the transition from a day job into working from home or even just give you a little bit of extra cash as a side hustle. Even if you are not looking for an additional source of income, websites are a great way to express your feelings about topics you are truly passionate about, but you need to know about tactics for promoting your website.
Whatever your reason for creating a website, you are probably looking at ways to promote it and grow your audience. It would be a huge waste of your hard work of putting your website together and ongoing content creation if no one was reading what you were publishing. With that being said, promoting your website is essential.
This article will give you a wide array of digital marketing insights, tactics and general information that you can use to both start marketing your new website, as well as information on building an ongoing marketing strategy to implement once you have a dedicated reader base.
Software
When you are starting to promote your new website, whether it is for a new business or a personal brand, you will need certain pieces of online software to help you manage your marketing tactics, leads, customers and other information about your marketing.
These software packages are easy to learn and will have an amazing impact on your marketing strategy from the word go.
HubSpot’s CRM
HubSpot’s Marketing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is quite possibly the most well-known marketing CRM out there, and what’s more, the basic version is completely free! HubSpot’s CRM will allow you to keep track of your leads and improve your sales funnel.
You can create tasks for yourself or other people, and set reminders for these to be done. You can also use HubSpot’s CRM to ensure leads are being followed up with properly, and minimising the risk of losing potential business due to them not being contacted.
Whilst the free version of the CRM is limited compared to the paid CRM, the free version will allow you to create a more efficient sales and marketing process for your business or personal brand.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the world’s best competitor research and backlink checking tools on the market. Whilst it is not free, the ‘Lite’ subscription starts at £75 per month, it is well worth the money for a variety of reasons.
One of the main reasons Ahrefs is such a great tool is because it allows you to keep track of all your main competitors backlinks! Not only is this useful for competitor link building, which we will talk about later in the article, it is also great for gauging how many links you will need to rank high in Google.
Ahrefs also allows you to keep track of all your backlinks, meaning you can see who has linked back to your website, and who has removed their links.
Rank Tracking Software
Rank tracking is also critical to making sure you start your marketing off on the right foot! You need to know where your new website falls in Google’s rankings for your chosen keywords, which will allow you to create a strategy that gets the best results for the time you set out to complete various tasks.
Here’s an example. Let’s say your new website falls at #46 in the rankings for “Exercises for People with Limited Time”, and falls #77 for the “Full-Body Fitness Plan”. You will know you need to spend a little bit more time link building for your full-body fitness plan than you do for your article on keeping fit when you have limited time.
A couple of great options for you would be AccuRanker and Agency Analytics. However, the rank tracker you select will be based on your needs and budget.
SEO & Link Building
Without a doubt, link building is the number one thing that Google takes into account when determining the position of websites within their rankings. If you launch your website and then do not complete any link building, your website is not going to do well. Link building is vital to any successful digital marketing campaign, no matter what the website.
Luckily, there are a number of tactics and tasks you can complete to build links to your brand new website:
Creating a “Beefy Resource”
This is one of the best link building tactics out there, especially for a brand new website, as it is a great way to get a large number of websites linking back to you in a very short space of time! The key thing to note here, however, is that the resource needs to be related to what your website is doing. For example, if you are a recruiter, you could build a large resource as to how to get a job in the recruitment industry and send this out to universities and colleges.
The great thing about this tactic is that, whilst it does take a very long time to create a good enough resource, it does not take a very long time to market! A simple email to the media teams of your targeted websites should do the trick. If the resource is good enough, the links will come!
Ranking in Google’s Featured Snippet
No matter how many linkable assets you create, and how many links you have on a high-profile website, nothing will ever be as good for your business as ranking highly on Google’s search rankings. This is why it is best practice to create a linkable asset as part of your SEO strategy because backlinks are the number one thing Google looks at when ranking websites.
You can go one step further with this by ranking in Google’s ‘Featured Snippet’. By now, you will have seen Google’s Featured Snippet on a wide array of search results, mainly for the following search query types:
- How To
- What Is
- When Is
Google will pull these answers from websites that, usually, are already ranking in the top 10 search results that follow a few conventions. For example, if you are looking to rank in the featured snippet for a ‘How To’ search term, posts that normally get a featured snippet spot will have bullet-pointed instructions within the blog posts.
Google’s featured snippet is sometimes referred to as ‘Position Zero’.
Setting Up Google Alerts
Setting up Google Alerts for your brand or business name, as well as your own name if you are the business owner, is a great quick win for SEO. A Google Alert will notify you if any of your chosen phrases is said on a website.
This means you can monitor your brand’s or business’ mentions and contact any website that mentions you without providing a link. This is a very high-converting tactic that does not take long to do, as well as the fact that it does not take long for someone else to add a link into their post, meaning there is a good chance they will accept your request.
The key here is to get it done quickly, so ensure you are regularly monitoring your business mentions and get onto any good link opportunities straight away if you can, that way, you’ll see the best results.
Competitor Link Building
Competitor link building is a great way to ensure that you are staying ahead of the competition in terms of your Google ranking, and marketing in general. Competitor link building involves finding websites that have featured your competitor with a link and using the same techniques they used to get a link on that website also.
One tool you can use here is Ahrefs. Ahrefs will allow you to search all your competitor’s backlinks and get on the same websites they have been featured in. If they have been added to a directory, get on that directory as well. If they have been featured in a blog article, find out what for, and see if there is an opportunity for you to do the same kind of thing, or get featured for something different.
If done well, competitor link building can be a great way to stay ahead of your competitors, but it must be done with an element of caution. For one, you do not want to be accused of copying your competitors by doing the same things they do in order to be featured on a news website, for example. You also need to ensure you are staying away from low-quality links. If Google recognises that you have links from lots of low-quality websites, your website might be marked as spam. This will mean a lower Google ranking.
Overall, however, competitor link building is a great tactic that should always be used in a new website’s startup marketing plan.
Guest Posting
We hear a lot, and I mean a lot, that guest posting is dead! And this simply is not the case. Yes, guest posting on low-quality websites certainly has less of an effect than it used to. However, if you can get guest posts or regular columns on high-quality websites with a high domain authority (DA), then you will still see some amazing results. All this means that you have to work slightly harder to get these high-quality links.
Nowadays, people have been more wary of offering up their website to guest posters as they know it will attract a lot of spam into their inboxes. However, a lot of websites will still open up their websites to the right kinds of posts, as long as it is relevant to their website and will be useful to their audience.
Why Is Link Building Important?
Link building is, by far, the number one tactic for getting your website higher in the search results. Whether it is a new website you are looking to market or the website has been going for some time. Even if you have the greatest website in the world, it is going to fail without a good link building strategy in place. This strategy needs to be effective, and long term!
The crucial thing here is to make sure your strategy can cope with the growth of your website. As your link building strategy becomes more effective, you will start to get more and more links. With these links come Google rankings. You can see where I’m going here. If you do not have a link building that can support this growth, all your hard work is going to go out the window.
Example Of A Great Link Building Strategy
One of my favourite examples of a great link building strategy comes from a guy who is very well known in the digital marketing and SEO space, Matthew Barby. Matthew Barby’s personal blog has proved to be a great link resource for him, allowing to grow his personal brand.
The thing to notice here is that he does not post on a regular basis. However, when he does post, the posts are very detailed and incredibly useful. This means that a lot of websites can link to his blog posts to help their readers out. Also, because it is his personal brand, he isn’t a competitor to anyone directly. This means that there are a lot of websites out there that will link out to him without any fear of losing readership.
You can find his website here.
Looking for more SEO tips? Check out our extensive blog article on Game Changing SEO Tactics for 2018!
Building An Email List
When you start a new website, building a good email list is crucial. For an email list to be defined as crucial, in my opinion, it needs to have a lot of subscribers who will read the majority of items you release. Not only that, they need to engage with your content as well! They need to be clicking links, following social media pages, and sharing your content with other people, all of which will enable you to grow your email list even more!
Why Is An Email List Important?
An email list is important because it allows you to create an audience that is more tailored to you. You will find that as more subscribers join your email list, they will all start to engage with your posts, both on your blog and within your list. This is because the content is relevant to them! They are more likely to subscribe, like, comment and share your main blog posts because they have a connection to you through your email list.
How Is An Email List Relevant To Your Website?
For an email list to be successful, you need to think of your list as an extension of your website. A ‘members only’ area if you will. You can release content to your email subscribers that’s not available on your blog, meaning if people want access to this, they need to be an email subscriber. Not only will this increase the size of your email list, but it will also grow your website. This is because, as more and more people subscribe to your list, they will start visiting your website more and more as well.
The trick here is converting these visitors, who may well only be looking on your website to see if you have released a new blog post. You can do this in a number of ways, but that’s for another article. See what we did there?
So, how do you get people to sign up to your email list?
Using HubSpot’s CRM To Attract Subscribers
One of the main features of HubSpot’s Marketing CRM is the fact that you can create pop-ups for your website visitors that will allow them to sign up to your email list. This means that you can create pop-ups for a specific email list to be placed on specific pages on your website, creating pop-ups with a high conversion rate.
HubSpot also allows you to track who has signed up to your email list through their pop-ups, which mean you can tailor your content for the groups of people who are more likely to sign up to your email list. This is a great quick win for getting more email addresses signed up to your list.
Converting Customers to Subscribers
If you already have a successful business set up, a great quick win you can use is getting your existing customers signed up to your email list. You can entice them in with the promise of offers on certain products or services. The chances are, if they have used your business before, you will be able to get them to subscribe to your list.
Another advantage of using this method is that it creates a more engaged list as your subscribers already have that relationship with your business already, meaning they are more likely to engage with your content.
Creating Locked Content
We talked earlier about beefy resources and large pieces of content and looked at the success it can bring your website in its early stages, this success can also be replicated when building your email list when you utilise locked content.
Locked content is, normally, a large piece of content that is locked or hidden from people, and can only be accessed with a password, PIN or a special link that is only shared to certain people.
When using this tactic to build your email list, you can create a large piece of content that would be very useful to your readers, and only share it with your email subscribers. That way, you can convince your already enticed website visitors to subscribe to your email list with an advert on your website to the piece of locked content. This tactic has been used, many times, on a large number of successful marketing campaigns.
Creating A Long Term Email Marketing Plan
Once you have used these tactics and built a large, engaged email list, you need to ensure that you are thinking about keeping these subscribers for the long haul. Using tactics such as locked content is fantastic, however, there is nothing stopping people from subscribing to your list, getting access to your content and then unsubscribing from your email list straight away.
Creating a long term email marketing plan can mean anything from creating ways to turn email subscribers into paying customers, or it could simply mean creating more and more content that creates interest on your list, keeping your email subscribers on your list.
Pay-Per-Click
Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, is a great way to kick start the success of your new website. PPC is the process of paying a certain amount of money per click to your website. Google Adwords is the most common tool used during PPC campaigns, however other tools are available.
PPC is most commonly used to bump your website to the top of Google for certain keywords. You then pay Google per click you get to your website. This is a great way for new websites to start a steady stream of traffic going to your website.
Why PPC Is Crucial For New Websites
PPC is absolutely crucial for any new website, whether you are a business or a blog! PPC is a relatively cheap and very easy way to get clicks to your website from your chosen audience based on the keywords you choose you to want to rank for!
For example, if you have created a guide on creating a CV, you want people downloading this to learn how to create a good CV! Using PPC, you can make sure you are at the top of Google for keywords like…
- Free CV Writing Guide
- CV Creation Guide
- Guide to Creating a CV
All of this means you are getting clicks from people who are looking for the exact thing you are advertising!
Setting A PPC Budget
Your PPC budget will depend greatly on what your website is going to be used for. For example, if you are an e-commerce website, there is a good chance that you are going to start generating revenue very quickly. However, if you are a blog, then it will take a great deal longer before you can even start thinking about making money from your blog.
The great thing about PPC is that you can set a budget that is right for you. For some of you, this might only be £5 per day. However, for some larger scale websites, you may be able to spend more money. However, there is no risk to your website because you are only paying for clicks you are getting. If the cost is getting too much, you can simply cancel.
It is all about making sure your budget is right for you.
Google Remarketing Ads
If using PPC to get to the top of Google for your chosen keywords isn’t right for your marketing strategy, then you should consider investing some time and a little bit of money into creating some display ads that will be shown to people who bounced from your website when they are on another website.
When done correctly, using remarketing ads can be a really good way to get bounced visitors back onto your website, and in some cases, to buy something. This is normally most successful for e-commerce websites as they can be used to remind some potential buyers that they didn’t do anything on your website, and in some cases, this can bring them back to your website to complete their purchase.
Measuring Your Marketing Success
Measuring the success of your new website marketing campaign is just as important as marketing your website! If you are not aware of what tactics are working and what tactics are not, then you are costing yourself clicks and potential business from your website. Luckily, there are a number of tools you can use to measure whether or not your marketing tactics are working for your website.
Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far the tool that is used the most by marketers, agencies, SEO teams and business owners alike as it can give you a wealth of information about how your website is performing! You can find out vital pieces of information such as bounce rate, the time spent on your website, as well as the number of visits you are accumulating each day.
Google Analytics also lets you track information such as the most popular pages on your website, and the time spent on each page. This will allow you to make small changes to your marketing campaigns to increase the chance of success you have on your website.
Using Google Adwords
If you take our advice and go on to start a PPC campaign for your website, then you will be using Google Adwords more than you use any other tool! Google Adwords will allow you to measure the performance of your Google ads, as well as track other pieces of information such as the amount you have spent on ads with Google and if this, overall, has been worth it or not.
Measuring information such as the number of clicks and impressions you have had over a certain period of time, as well as what keywords and websites these clicks and impressions came from will allow you to streamline your marketing to make sure your ad campaign is as successful as it can be!
Rank Tracking Software
Overall, however, you are going to be more concerned with how your website is performing in the Google search results, and for that, you need rank tracking software like the examples we talked about earlier on in the article.
Using this rank tracking software will allow you to measure where each of your chosen keywords lie in the search results, meaning you can focus more attention on the keywords that need the most attention.
Marketing is never about spending the same amount of time on each keyword. You always tend to focus more time on the keywords that are not doing well, than the ones that are at position 1. This is now, and will always be the case. You will always find yourself working more on struggling keywords.
Rank tracking software will allow you to focus on which keywords need targeting in the coming days, weeks and months. This, overall, will help you create a successful marketing campaign.
To Sum Up
Well, I hope this article has given at least one actionable tactic that you can go away and use with the marketing of your new website. One thing to keep in mind is that digital marketing is always changing, and there is nothing more fun than constantly learning about new tactics to use on your website!
And after all, this, if you’re still looking for something more, check out our guide on Driving Traffic to your Website!
