How To Promote Your New Website

Launching a new website takes a huge amount of effort – but that doesn’t stop the minute you go live. In order to get your new site in front of as many people as possible, you’ll need to get to work promoting it and bringing in visitors. Here are some easy ways to get started if you’re wondering how to promote your new website.

How to Promote Your New Website

Congratulations – you’ve launched your new website! It looks great and you’re ready to start receiving visitors, capturing leads, making sales, and enjoying a much better online presence that reflects how great your business is.

So you wait. And you wait…. Tumbleweed rolls by… Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Where’s the traffic? Where are all those lovely potential customers?

Do not despair. This is completely normal.

Whether your DIYed your new site or worked with a web designer, there’s a universal truth: a newly-launched site is a quiet site.

When your website (and domain name) are brand new, people aren’t going to find them on Google. Or at least they won’t find them easily. It takes time for Google to trust new sites, and until then you’ll likely find yourself languishing on page ten of the search results, if you even make it at all.

Additionally, no one else on the web is going to be linking to your new site yet. Hence the lack of traffic.

So what to do? Get out there and promote your new site yourself.

How do I promote my new website?

Don’t sit back and wait for traffic to start trickling in. After all the hard work that went into creating your website, now it’s time to generate some excitement and buzz around your launch and get people visiting.

If we build it, they will come.
Yeah…not so much

Promoting your new site is an essential part of any website launch and it’s up to you as the business owner to lead the charge.

You do have to be prepared to play the long game when it comes to building long-term sustainable visibility (particularly with SEO), but there are plenty of things you can do now to kickstart your traffic and get you in front of potential customers.

10 Easy Ways to Promote Your New Website

1. Promote Your New Website on Social Media

Let’s start with the most obvious method, which you may already be doing. Time to splash your new website URL all over your social media accounts, and encourage people to check out your awesome new site.

Social platforms are an easy way to promote your new site, but there are things you can do to make your efforts more successful. As well as just posting your links, think about doing some of these:

2. Create a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business)

This one is useful for all businesses, but is essential for anyone relying on local custom for their business.

What used to be Google My Business has been rebranded as Google Business Profile. In a nutshell, it’s a free way to make your business easier to find when people make location-based searches or look on Google Maps.

Within your Google Business Profile, you can add your website link as well as listing useful information such as your location, contact details and opening hours. You can even add photos of your premises, products, team etc. This is also where people can leave Google Reviews of your services.

Having an up-to-date and optimised Google Business Profile can help to boost both your visibility and your search engine rankings.

3. Use Email Marketing

One of the simplest, fastest, and most cost-effective ways of promoting your new website is with email. If you already have an email list then don’t hesitate in telling your subscribers all about it.

(If you don’t already have an email list, then setting up lead capture and linking it to an email platform should be top of the website to-do list. If you need help with this then I can set it up for you. View Email Marketing Services)

There are plenty of people out there who are desperate to tell you that email as a marketing channel is dead. Lol. Believe me, it’s not. It still brings in a huge ROI compared to other channels and it’s here to stay.

Here are some easy ways to make a splash about your new site via email:

4. Using SEO on Your New Website

If you’re launching a new website (or redesigning an existing one), SEO should already be a key part of your design and development process. It’s vital for every website that wants to get found.

However, I’m sticking it at number 4 in the list because SEO tends to make many business owners cringe and groan, so I thought I’d start with the more user-friendly ideas and slip SEO in where it’s less likely to make you run for the hills.

SEO is also a long game rather than a quick fix, especially compared to some of the other methods in this article, but it’s the one item in this list that you can’t afford to neglect. It will likely take Google weeks or months to recognise your efforts, but the long-term pay-off is well worth the effort.

Some ideas to check out that you can action now:

5. Use Content Marketing

The term content marketing gets thrown around a lot, but I’ve found that many business owners I speak to are confused about what it is and why it’s useful.

Is it blogging? Is it to do with social media? What actually is it?! (Hint: it’s both, and more 😊)

A simple content marketing strategy is to produce a piece of content (usually a blog but could also be video or audio content) that’s useful and relevant to your audience, and then repurpose that across your marketing channels, such as social media and email.

So why is content marketing so useful?

Big brands that are household names have the luxury of knowing that people will find their websites by typing their brand name into Google, or that they’re guaranteed to be in the top three places of the search results for their most popular keyword.

Sadly, this is not the case for the rest of us. For most small-medium businesses, most people won’t google you by name, and if you’re newly established you won’t even be on the first page (or 5) of the search results for the top keywords.

Content marketing gives people a whole new way to find you. If you’re producing articles or videos that are relevant for your audience, they can find you that way. The content gets them onto your website via the blog (and then it’s your job to make sure they don’t bounce off).

Benefits of content marketing:

6. Guest Blogging / Guest Posting

As well as posting regularly on your own blog, a great strategy for sharing the word about your new website is to guest post on other people’s websites.

Writing a guest blog for a website who has a similar audience to yours gets your business in front of a whole new set of eyes – PLUS you’ll get to link back to your own site, which is really valuable for SEO.

The idea is to write a blog post which really showcases your expertise but is not just an advertising piece. Always provide real value to the audience, and they’ll be much more likely to click through and visit your website.

But how to go about securing a guest blog spot? Try networking with other small business owners in your local area. Or seek out sites on social media who share an audience with yours, whether by interest or location. A lot of site owners are desperate for quality content, so pitch them your idea and you might find they say yes.

7. Paid Advertising

If you have any budget available to promote your new website, then you can run paid ads to get the word out. Depending on your market, audience, goals and budget, you can choose to advertise on Google, social media, or both.

Promoting Your Website on Google AdWords

Google AdWords is the biggest pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform out there, and although you can run hugely complex and expensive campaigns on there, it’s easy to get started with a simple campaign and an affordable budget.

You can create adverts around the keywords that your audience will be searching for, and you can target your ads to specific demographics. Because it’s pay-per-click, you don’t get charged when the ad is shown to users: you only get charged when they click through onto your website.

You’re not charged a set fee per click. Instead the ads run on an auction basis, where you’ll be competing with other advertisers who are bidding on the same keywords as you. Your budget is key in securing the top advertising spot on a Google search results page, but opther factors aare also taken into account, such as the click-through rate (CTR) of your ad, and the keyword relevance of the web page that your user will land on.

Once you’ve spent all of your allocated budget for the day, then your ad will no longer show and so you can’t be overcharged.

Promoting Your Website With Social Media Advertising

You’ve probably experienced the sinking feeling of creating great social media content for your business, only to find that your lovingly created post tanked and only a handful of people even saw it.

It’s not you. The algorithm is designed to give businesses a tiny reach so that you’re forced to pay-to-play. If you’re up for giving Zuckerberg some of your hard-earned cash, then Facebook and Instagram adverts can be a fantastic way of promoting your website through social media and getting clicks onto your site.

With paid social ads you have a large selection of targeting options to reach your key audience. Not only can you choose from certain demographic groups, you can also target your existing customers, friends of existing followers, people who like certain pages, and other custom audience targeting.

Both PPC and social ads can be set up quite quickly, so it’s worth giving them a go if you’ve got even a small budget to spend.

8. Collaborations and Co-Marketing

Collaborating with other businesses in your niche or your local area can be a really powerful way to promote your website and your business.

One of the easiest ways to promote your new website is to co-market it with any people who worked on the project with you – such as photographers, designers, developers and copywriters.

Run some social media content about what it was like to work with them and tag them in your posts. If they can do the same for you, you’re getting in front of a whole new audience.

9. Try to Get Press and Media Coverage

If you’re serving a local audience with your website, then getting some local press coverage is the best way to start. Contact local papers, business publications, business groups etc and pitch a story and/or launch offer about your business. If you can secure an interview, even better! Always ask for a link back to your website for the best exposure.

You can also get media coverage by using a platform such as Help a Reporter Out (HARO) which connects journalists with sources they need for articles. The reporters get the info they need and you get press coverage (and hopefully a link to your website).

Simply register on the HARO site and you’ll get emails daily looking for sources for their articles.

10 Make Sure You’re Promoting It Offline Too!

It’s easy to forget to promote your website in places other than the internet, but it’s worth doing! Make sure you add your web address to business cards, flyers etc. You can even create a QR code for people to scan which will take them straight to your website without having to type the address.

If you ship physical products, include a card in the box promoting your new website – ideally giving people an exclusive discount code to incentivise them onto the site, hopefully getting you some repeat business in the process.

Your website works for you 24/7, so make sure you’re never missing a chance to get people onto the site.

However you go about promoting your new website, remember to take some time to celebrate too. It’s a lot of work getting a site launched, so take the time to congratulate yourself for a job well done!