It astounds me time and time again! Companies of all shapes and sizes spend thousands of pounds building the most beautiful website but doing nothing to promote it so it kind of sits around looking pretty but doing nothing, like a girl being stood up on prom night.
With the web 2.0/social media revolution on the internet in full swing, it is now more important than ever to concentrate on your promotional as well as building a beautiful website. I remember the good old days of ‘web 1.0’ when all I had to do to promote a client website was create a email list and make sure they perform pretty well on search engines. These days, there are thousands of web 2.0 type services out there that help promote your website and in turn do recommendations to your audience. This means that your audience is more fragmented than ever (creating ultra-niches) meaning that more than ever you need to promote your web presence to reach your audience. Chance are your competitors are doing this already.
If you’re still not convinced, have a look at the promotional diagram of this blog (click on it to see a bigger version) to see how much effort is put into promotion as compared to the site development:
Where to start promoting
If you’re not entirely sure what you are doing in the social media space, then it’s time to call in the experts as it can be a mine field of disasters if not done properly. That being said, here are 10 things you should be thinking about or researching:
- Search engine optimisation: Get up the rankings on Google!
- Social Media Press Release (which can help with search engine optimisation) if done correctly.
- Social network marketing: How’s your company’s presence on Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. Your audience are there and can be reached with little cost.
- Social bookmarking bar: Make it really easy for your readers to recommend your presence to millions of likeminded readers.
- RSS Feeds: Once you have your content in RSS feeds, there are many things you can do with it, essentially using your valuable (in consumer’s eyes) content to promote your online presence.
- Widgets: A great way to go viral and you can use the content from your RSS feed to dynamically populate the widget.
- Email subscription option: If your website doesn’t have this, it’s time to pull out the ol’ drawing board.
- A Blog: Position your company as thought leaders by writing a regularly updated blog about the space you operate in.
- Active blogging: Keep an eye on blogs talking about your industry and comment on them when relevant.
- Sitemap: Get a XML sitemap on your site to make it easy for Google to index your site and push it up the rankings.
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