How to Promote Your Website on a Budget
© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.
Many website owners are stuck between a rock and a hard place right now, in terms of promoting their sites. They know they have to promote their websites constantly in order to drive qualified traffic. But times are tough right now, and many people are cutting their marketing budgets in response to economic changes.
It's a classic catch 22. How do you promote your website on the cheap? What kind of low-cost promotional techniques can you use to generate valuable traffic without blowing your budget?
It's time for some hard truth about Internet marketing. If you don't create the kind of business website that promotes itself, you will always have to spend your precious time and money to promote the site. So the goal here is to develop the kind of website that other bloggers and webmasters talk about without being paid to do so. If you can achieve this goal (and you can if you put your mind to it), you will find that your website essentially promotes itself. And think of the time, energy and money you'll save when that happens.
Buzz. Word of mouth. Citations and referrals. These are the things that every webmaster should strive for, and this goes double for those of us who rely on our sites for business purposes. If you can create the kind of website that generates constant word-of-mouth exposure, links and citations, the site will promote itself.
You see this kind of thing happen all the time online. In fact, as I write this blog post, I'm listening to an online music website that I heard about through word-of-mouth marketing. It's called Pandora, and one of my friends was telling me to check it out for the longest time. "It's so great," she would say. "So much better than the other websites offering free music." So I checked it out, and you know what? It is great. I'm now a member, and I use the website every day. I also tell people about it constantly! And that's why Pandora does so little marketing (if any). Their website promotes itself through buzz, word of mouth, and referrals.
Granted, most business sites won't have the kind of traffic and user base of a website like Pandora. But it's the concept I want you to grasp, not this particular manifestation of it. If you work hard to build value, usefulness into your site ... if you make it better and more unique than competing websites within your niche ... if you exploit an under-served niche or come up with some truly unique ... then you won't have to spend anything to promote your website online. The promotion will run on auto-pilot.
So how do you build this kind of site? Well, it's not easy -- I can tell you that much. If it were simple, everyone would have this kind of web presence. I feel I'm starting to achieve this goal on one of my other websites (the Home Buying Institute), because I can see that people are beginning to talk about and recommend the site to others, without any input from me. Here's a list of things I've put in place on that website in order to get people talking about it ... and to make the website promote itself. Note: For the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to the Home Buying Institute as "HBI" from here on out.
The Internet is an overcrowded place with an abundance of competition. Even if you serve a small niche, or you focus on a small geographical area, you can be sure there are other websites already occupying that web space. The key to promoting a website is to create the kind of site that promotes itself. This will save you time, energy and money.
It's a classic catch 22. How do you promote your website on the cheap? What kind of low-cost promotional techniques can you use to generate valuable traffic without blowing your budget?
It's time for some hard truth about Internet marketing. If you don't create the kind of business website that promotes itself, you will always have to spend your precious time and money to promote the site. So the goal here is to develop the kind of website that other bloggers and webmasters talk about without being paid to do so. If you can achieve this goal (and you can if you put your mind to it), you will find that your website essentially promotes itself. And think of the time, energy and money you'll save when that happens.
Building Value Into Your Website
Buzz. Word of mouth. Citations and referrals. These are the things that every webmaster should strive for, and this goes double for those of us who rely on our sites for business purposes. If you can create the kind of website that generates constant word-of-mouth exposure, links and citations, the site will promote itself.
You see this kind of thing happen all the time online. In fact, as I write this blog post, I'm listening to an online music website that I heard about through word-of-mouth marketing. It's called Pandora, and one of my friends was telling me to check it out for the longest time. "It's so great," she would say. "So much better than the other websites offering free music." So I checked it out, and you know what? It is great. I'm now a member, and I use the website every day. I also tell people about it constantly! And that's why Pandora does so little marketing (if any). Their website promotes itself through buzz, word of mouth, and referrals.
Granted, most business sites won't have the kind of traffic and user base of a website like Pandora. But it's the concept I want you to grasp, not this particular manifestation of it. If you work hard to build value, usefulness into your site ... if you make it better and more unique than competing websites within your niche ... if you exploit an under-served niche or come up with some truly unique ... then you won't have to spend anything to promote your website online. The promotion will run on auto-pilot.
So how do you build this kind of site? Well, it's not easy -- I can tell you that much. If it were simple, everyone would have this kind of web presence. I feel I'm starting to achieve this goal on one of my other websites (the Home Buying Institute), because I can see that people are beginning to talk about and recommend the site to others, without any input from me. Here's a list of things I've put in place on that website in order to get people talking about it ... and to make the website promote itself. Note: For the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to the Home Buying Institute as "HBI" from here on out.
- Content, content and more content. It's hard to get excited about a business website with five pages of information. But if you can develop extremely useful articles, tutorials, glossaries, learning center, blogs, market news and the like, you'll get some people talking. This is the hardest part about creating a quality website, because you can't "copy and paste" your way through. You have to develop highly useful and original content. This is the centerpiece of a website that promotes itself.
- Organization and usability. With all of that great content, you have to make sure the site is nice and neat. Everything should have its own place on your website, and it should be easy to find through more than one path (navigation, search, site map, etc.). Clutter and disorganization will kill your online success before it even gets going. After all, why promote a website that people are just going to leave upon arrival?
- Interactivity and feedback. People like to interact with websites these days. It's part of the social web, also referred to as Web 2.0. When you offer people more ways to interact, participate and respond, you'll enjoy greater success (more leads, more clients, and more business). On the HBI website, we recently launched the Consumer Credit Blog that allows readers to enter their questions for a response within 48 hours. This has not only generated a ton of interaction from site visitors, but it also gets links and citations from other bloggers and webmasters.
- Being different and better. Find out what your competitors are doing with their websites, and then do something different and/or better with your own site. If you simply replicate what others are doing, you have little chance of standing out. That's now way to promote your website to Internet users! People are tired of the same old thing. So offer something unique -- great content and more of it, useful tools and resources, an interactive blog or community of some kind.
The Internet is an overcrowded place with an abundance of competition. Even if you serve a small niche, or you focus on a small geographical area, you can be sure there are other websites already occupying that web space. The key to promoting a website is to create the kind of site that promotes itself. This will save you time, energy and money.
Labels: Real Estate Websites
posted by Brandon at
9:16 AM
