You have your own website, up and running. That's great. But now what?
A website on the web should be built with at least one purpose. Without a purpose, there is no point of having it online. And if that purpose is to be seen, the work after having a website is far from over. There is a continuous process of promoting and maintaining.
Most websites live to get the most traffic it can muster. If your website relies on traffic for revenue, you need to figure out how to increase that traffic.
To do this, you must realize that traffic isn't going to come naturally without you doing anything. People will come to your website and learn about what you're doing, but if you rely on your website without doing anything, there's a guarantee that you won't get enough traffic to even maintain your operational cost.
This is why, once your website is created, you need to nurture and promote it. Here are some of the common ways:
Paid Advertising
The first and the easiest option. Pursuing advertising means that you pay for your ads to show on others' website. Using Google's AdWords, for example, allows you to promote your website using a pay-per-click (CPC) basis.
Paid advertising is the fastest way to get at least some guaranteed traffic to your website, as long as you can spare some budget for it.
This however, can be a problem since most new web owners don't have the money to spend on this method. For that reason, they need to use other strategies, like SEO.
Search Engine Optimization
Also called SEO, is a strategy to make your website rank higher on search engines' results pages. This strategy is relatively cheaper, but involves a lot of work. But the result can be long-lasting and indeed worth the effort.
First of all, SEO is how to make your website friendly to search engines, in a way that follows their guidelines. With clear structures, clean codes and crawlable pages to meta optimization among others, SEO is a continuous process that needs learning and adapting.
From keyword research to backlinks, to content posts and others. They should be done on a regular basis.
Blogging
If your website relies on search engines for traffic, you need to show the search engines that your website has a lot to give. The idea here, is to create more crawlable pages on your website, which adds authority and optimization.
Blogging is a strategy to tell search engines that your website indeed has contents people will like. To do this, you need to target keywords that match your contents and your desired audience's need.
When blogging, you need to make sure that you can build an audience, and able to keep them happy and returning. A great blog is based on hard work. And with appealing contents, you won't only appeal search engines, but also human visitors.
So here, blogging should have SEO in mind, with humans as a priority.
Branding
A name that should stick on people's mind. It describes who you are, what your business does, and how you build awareness.
As a supplementary strategy, you can create a brand for your website so people will recognize you, and can tell you apart from others.
For example, if you built a website for your startup, you could start a side blog about your experiences as an entrepreneur, and develop your personal social media profiles in addition to your corporate identities. If executed effectively, the strategy can help you increase your visibility, gain more trust, and allow people to associate your product with what you do best.
Social Media
Your website may have most of its traffic coming from search engines. As a newly created website, this is probably the most obvious. But if you want to get even more traffic, the next way is to be active on social media networks to benefit yourself and your audience.
In the modern internet-connected world with mobile users growing rapidly, there is an increasing number of people that rely on social media for information, news, memes, trends and other imaginable topics. Here, if you're active on social media, you can connect with hundreds of millions of people (if not billions), and eventually build up a following that stays with your brand and provide a steady stream of inbound traffic.
Combine that with crawlability and the number of pages that you have from blogging, you can make sure that you have a continuous supply of contents for your potential visitors to read. One thing to make sure when promoting your contents on social media is that, you need to have an appealing headline.
Press Release
This is where you get all the help you need.
When you first launch your website, you can submit a press release to announce your presence. While this may cost you, but the formal announcement should be able to distribute your message to your potential audience, in a way that previous methods didn't suffice.
By having a press release, you can instantly spread the information about your new website, fast and easy. And can get backlinks along the way, also fast and easy.
Guest Posts
After creating a website, its social media presence and SEO, the next powerful strategy, is to start guess posting.
You can pitch websites with high authority in your niche, and have your posts published by them. Appeal their audience, so they can return you with a hefty amount of traffic. If you earn a great spot when doing this, you can expose yourself to an entirely new audience.
You can build your reputation, and get back high-quality backlinks from them.
Summary
There are a lot of ways to get people's attention on the web. And the above should help you get started.
But no matter what strategy you use, you need to measure the results. With analytics data on your hand, you can experiment new approaches, or tweak your strategies to make better results.
What you need to know is that, while one strategy may work wonders from one website, it doesn't mean that it will do the same to you. This is why you should always improvise and get updates about new trends and demands. This is where you need to take your time and be patience.
There are a lot of people like you on the web, and to be different, you need to be unique.