Promoting Your Website in 2017 - Outbound Marketing

We covered inbound marketing, SEO, Site design and the Best Practices for Optimizing your Website for 2017 in the last post..

This piece covers the major concepts to consider when designing a complementary inbound marketing service.

So, now you built and tested a beautifully Optimized Website for 2017. Now it the time to build a system of promotion.

'My site is sweet!.. I just wish people would use it..'

A beautifully designed website that is not promoted, is like owning a Ferrari that never leaves your garage.

It is time to drive this brand new Ferrari out and onto the mean streets of doing business.



In this analogy, the following applies:

• Ferrari = Your website
• Pain Job = How your website is presented in promotion
• Sales Floor = How and Where you create demand and visibility for your brand, disseminate links to your site, and convert website traffic into sales
• Gasoline = Text, Image and Video content
• Driver = Emotive content generation, link building, client interaction and social networking
• Insurance = Reputation management
• Maintenance = Fine tuning with Analytics

To develop the best promotional plan, one should see your website as a product to market, like a Ferrari, rather than the service or product being promoted by the website. That said, your branding should carry through every step, so you will always be in promotion of your brand.

The field of product marketing has particular techniques that are highly useful in marketing a website. Product design and packaging is very important in a successful product; as is user experience and branding for a website. We should also consider the 'packaging', or the importance of the specific content that carries your brand message and or website link.

Ok, enough theory... I think you get the idea.. Now to the specifics:

Covering SEO best practices for 2017 in the last post, the following is a list of the most general steps one should take in outbound promotion of a website. Local optimization, or localization, is its own animal. For now, we will set the specifics of localization aside for a future post. 

We also know, with the right budget one can get a lot of buzz for your site with a good super bowl ad.. but for the rest of us?



The following is a short list of Best Website Promotional Practices for 2017 and applies to both local and national businesses:

• Register with Google Webmaster Tools
• Submit Sitemaps to Google
• Install and verify Google Analytics
• Register with Bing Webmaster Tools
• Register and confirm your URL with major Social Media platforms
• Create Google Business profile with specific company info to match the info on your site
• Include this exact brand, links and company info to all social media, public profiles and listings
• Use both long and short tail keywords as anchor text for website hyperlinks
• Generate inbound links from unowned, topically relevant, high-value websites
• Generate links from unowned content (press piece, shared image, unowned blog posts, etc.)
• Create highly emotive content that elicits the action you desire - share, like, comment, etc. 
• Optimize images and video with metadata: branding, contact information and website links
• Make sure all branding, contact info and links remain viable through sharing and reposting
• Include links to all owned web properties on all owned web properties 
• Continually post content to Social Media, on your site, and on an off-site blog
• Include branding and contact information on all printed collateral material with QR scan code
• Include branding and links in all email correspondence. 
• Include branding and links in a regular email marketing campaign
• Generate a branded newsletter program and integrate it with your email marketing system
• Include branding and links in all advertisements on and off-line
• Include branding and contact information in all public presentations
• Include links to website and social media within off-site blog posts
• Install 'followed' links to your off-site blog posts from your website
• Generate positive customer reviews, promote and repurpose them
• Participate in topical forums and leave your calling card
• Leave contributory comments on popular Youtube and Vimeo industry videos
• Post to Google + communities and include links  
• Work # threads on Linkedin, facebook, twitter to create social mentions of your brand.
• Promote linked and branded posts within a specific social network, and cross social platforms
• Use SlideShare, Prezi or other shared platforms to post branded and linked content
• Use retargeting to target those who visited your site in the past, deliver branding and links
• Install appropriate schema markup for shared links to control delivery of brand message
• Develop a display ad barter network with complimentary businesses
• Make sure all content that is shared on the web is shareable itself
• Create on and off-line promotions that encourage social sharing of your content
• Create Social Media events that produce message reminders, creating brand mentions

There we go, your Farrari is tricked out, fastest ride on the track...

There are endlessly creative methods of promoting your site. As usual, you only have to do more than your competition in order to rank number one for your desired keywords.

In any case, the steps outlined in this post, you should be on the right track to creating a powerful online brand that should land you in a solid SERP position, even when competing with much larger budgets.

All in good fun... not only do you have a Ferrari of a site, you are now the Dale Earnhardt Jr. of Internet Marketing.

Stay tuned for a series of posts about Analytics: how to measure the success of your marketing program, learn what is working and what is not, and how to adjust your program for the highest return on your marketing spend.

Tony Sternad
HabaneroMarketing@gmail.com
510-545-2054