5 Ways to Market Your Business with Your Website

Like every other sales effort, it’s a means, not an end

Great, your website has gone live. But if you think your job is done, you’re missing out on huge marketing opportunities. Check out this list of proven strategies to keep your website working for you every day.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Make your site more visible to search engines like Google, so when people search for businesses like yours the site will appear in the first page or two of Google’s results. The phrase SEO typically refers to unpaid efforts (as opposed to paid ads) to drive traffic to your site, including:

• Adding commonly searched words and phrases (“keywords”) to the site’s text and meta data
• Ensuring that all coding is accessible and acceptable to search indexes
• Increasing inbound links from other websites (more about this below) and cross-linking between pages within the website

2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This means paying someone to promote your site on the Internet.

• Banner ads on search engine and social media sites, which are chosen according to the demographic you want to reach (age, profession, geographic area, etc.) and paid for in various ways such as pay-per-click or flat fee.
• Bloggers and reviewers. You send them free samples of your product in the hope that they’ll spread the good word about you to their following.

3. Retarget
Once someone visits your site, you can have your ad appear wherever he goes on the Internet (at least, until he deletes the cookie your site placed on his computer). Since 98% of site visitors are not converted on the first visit, reminding them to come back is a great way to increase your conversion rate.

4. Place your content on other websites
This is the most controllable and effective way to populate the web with inbound links to your website. Create articles, videos, reviews, discussions, contests or whatever else you want on high traffic sites such as:

• Social media (FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
• Self publishers (Pinterest, YouTube, FlickR)
• Industry-specific forums and blogs
• News / press release distributors

5. Get your site in others’ content
This means promoting and managing public opinion so that people mention and link to your site without you paying them to do it.

• Blogs
• Review sites (Yelp, Trip Advisor, epinions, Amazon)
• Social media pages of your associates and customers