When was the last time someone shared your product and services pages?
Better yet, when was the last time that your "get a quote" or "contact page" went viral?
The truth is that website promotion doesn't work that way.
And if all you're focusing on is promoting things like sales pages, you will likely fall behind.
So how do you promote your website?
You're about to learn 10 proven ways to do it on a shoestring budget.
Stay tuned.
[music]
What's up marketers, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs,
the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate
your niche.
Now, there's a ton of material to cover today, and the most important thing is that you get results.
But there's something you need to understand about these strategies before I teach them.
Website or business promotion in the present day doesn't work like it used to 10 or 20
years ago.
Before, people would sift through newspapers, send direct mail, and then they'd sit there and crossed
their fingers and hope that someone would be in the market for whatever it is that they're selling.
But the Internet has flipped that world upside down and made one of the world's greatest
resources accessible to everyone, for free.
Think about it.
People look for reviews before they buy.
And I bet that there are even times when you're in the store and you're looking for reviews
before you buy something.
Or you might even be comparing prices to see if you can get a better deal elsewhere.
So as marketers, we need to adapt and respond to the need for quality and reliable information.
So these website promotion tactics that you're about to learn cater to how consumers respond today.
And that's through content.
So let's dive right into our website promotion hacks.
The first way to promote your website is one of my favorites, and that's to take a data-driven
approach to forum commenting.
Here's the thing, blindly answering every question in your niche on a forum like Quora
will likely leave you with zero results and a ton of wasted time.
But there are a couple things you can do to know with confidence whether the question
has potential to drive traffic back to your website.
So the step one is to type in "Quora.com" into Ahrefs Site Explorer.
And you can see that the domain gets 151 million search visitors per month.
Now let's go to the top pages report, so we can see the pages that get the most organic
search traffic.
Now, let's say that I have a website on college education, I'll type in the keyword, "college,"
into the include search box.
Now, you can see the estimated search traffic that each page gets, so it's just a matter
of picking and choosing the topics that are relevant to the content on your website.
So, let's click through to this one that looks like it's about the length of a college semester.
And once you land on this page, you'll want to look at two things.
First is the total number of views that the question has had, which you can see in the
sidebar if you're logged into your Quora account.
Next, look for a recent answer to calculate the approximate monthly traffic.
This one was answered around 7 months ago and has accumulated around 6,600 views.
Now, do the math.
6,600 divided by 7 months, is approximately 942 views per month.
From here, you could provide a better answer than the existing ones and include relevant
links back to your pages.
From my experience, I've seen 30-40% click through rates to links that support your answer.
The next promotion strategy is to dip into untapped paid media sources, so that automatically
excludes Facebook ads and Google Adwords.
Now, don't get me wrong, both of these ad platforms are amazing and can produce insane ROI for
your business.
But in general, ad networks work as auctions.
So as more people flock to these networks, the prices skyrocket.
But there are less popular places to advertise for cheap.
The one ad platform that I've been raving about over the past two years is Pinterest ads.
Check out these results from one of my paid campaigns.
Just under $1,500 spent, translated into almost 15,000 clicks and 140,000 engagements, which
would be repins, likes, and comments.
That's $0.10 per click, $1.23 per thousand impressions, and a penny per engagement.
Now, you don't need to spend $1,500 per month, instead, you can spend $10 dollars, $20 dollars,
$50, or $100 and see where that takes you.
Pinterest is well known for the quality of traffic they send to websites.
And it's definitely one that I encourage you to explore if your target audience is using it.
Other untapped ad networks that you may not have used are Outbrain, Taboola and Yahoo Gemini.
Again, I've found informational content to work significantly better than landing pages.
So experiment and take advantage of these untapped networks.
The next promotion technique is to guest blog.
Now, I know that guest blogging can be hit or miss since not everyone has a "Write for
us" page asking people for guest posts.
So I want to share two surefire ways to find websites that you can approach, confidently
knowing that they accept guest posts.
First is to Google a query like, "guest post by", and then intitle:your topic.
And you'll find some very relevant websites that are clearly accepting guest posts.
Now, if you're an Ahrefs user, then you can use our SEO toolbar by enabling the Chrome
or Firefox extension.
And right away, you'll be able to see the SEO metrics like Domain Rating and Search
Traffic, so you can see how much Google traffic the websites get on a domain level.
That way, you'll know whether writing for these sites are worth your time, or if it's
an opportunity you should skip.
So now you can pitch the website owners, knowing that they accept guest posts, even though
they may not have a "Write for us" page.
Another way you can do this is using Ahrefs Content Explorer.
You can use similar search operators here.
So let's search for title:pregnancy and then as a phrase match "guest post by."
Next, I'll click on the "One article per domain" filter since we don't need to contact the
same website more than once.
And now we have 215 sites we can guest post for, plus all of the SEO metrics to help narrow
down the sites we want to write for.
The next promotion strategy is to get free press from journalists using HARO.
HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out.
Their platform allows journalists to find sources, and for sources to find journalists.
After you sign up for an account, you'll get email notifications that look like this.
You just need to skim through the results, and if something catches your eye, then you
can read the full description.
So this person wants some tips on maintaining a balance between your personal and business lives.
And she's also made it a requirement that you should be a small business owner or employee.
If you fit the criteria, then click on the email link, write a short and sweet pitch
that provides unique insights and fulfills all requirements that they're looking for.
And if they like your answer, you should get an email like this that will almost always
include a high-quality link back to your site.
Let's stay on the topic of PR with the next promotion strategy, and that's to become a
source for journalists on any publication that you want.
HARO is awesome to get emails directly from journalists in your inbox, but the requests
that come through can be hit or miss.
Using Google Alerts, you can expand your search to only specific topics from publications
that you want to be featured in.
Let's say that you're an expert on hurricanes and want to be a source for journalists on
websites like the New York Times or the Huffington post.
So you can create an alert like this.
Just type within parentheses (site:nytimes.com or site:huffingtonpost.com) or whatever website
you want to monitor, and then I'll type intitle:hurricane.
What this query does is it tells Google to send you an alert anytime the New York Times
or the Huffington Post writes an article where the title has the word "hurricane" in it.
Now, when you get an alert that matches your criteria, you can skim through the article
and look for a place where you can add more value.
From there, you would contact the author, introduce yourself with your qualifications,
and offer your expertise for that article or for any future articles that they might write
on that topic.
The next website promotion technique is to use social groups and I'm not just talking
about Facebook.
Facebook groups are great and there's a group for virtually any topic under the sun.
But group owners and moderators are very well aware that people will often join their group
just to promote their website, product or service.
But you want to know another group that actually encourages posting links to your blog? Pinterest.
Pinterest group boards are essentially collaborations where a group of people share links, images,
and videos on a specific topic.
You can find group boards by going to pingroupie.com and searching for your topic here.
So I'll type in "animals."
And now you can see a bunch of group boards that would be worth reaching out to along
with the number of followers and how often content gets repinned.
Let's click on this one on "wildlife".
And you can see that the description shows some rules for the board.
Other times, the owner of the board will include their contact details, so contact them, ask
to join their board, and boom, you now have access to reach the board's followers with
your content.
In fact, Group Boards have been a huge part of the reason why one of my accounts gets
over a million viewers and 60,000 engagements every single month.
The next tip is to create a free resource or tool and promote the heck out of it.
Knowledge is power.
And if you can make attaining knowledge easier, then all the power to you.
So here are a few ideas of what you can create.
First is a video course on a topic.
And it doesn't have to be anything fancy, but it should provide value.
So for example, if I wanted to show people how to create videos for YouTube, then I might
make 3 videos.
One that talks about equipment and setup, another on choosing topics, and one on video
marketing or YouTube SEO.
Another resource you can create are templates.
At Ahrefs, we love creating Google sheets and sometimes we include them in our blog posts,
which enhances our articles because it helps people take action using the exact same documents
that we use.
And the last one is my favorite, and that's to create a free tool.
People love free and people love tools.
Take this one as an example.
You can paste in a line separated list, and it converts it into a comma separated list.
And according to Ahrefs Site Explorer, this page gets around 2,400 monthly search visitors
from Google every single month.
But I get it.
You may not have the skillset to create these tools.
Well you can actually create a simple calculator using Upwork or even Fiverr starting
at just $20!
Here's a really cool way to find tool ideas worth building.
I'll go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer tool and type in "college," assuming that's a keyword
related to my industry.
Next, I'll go to the phrase match report.
Finally, I'll type in the word "calculator" in the include box.
And right away, we have a list of potential tools we can create.
Looking at the top 10 Google search results, for the first keyword, "college GPA calculator",
you'll see that the top ranking page generates over 750,000 search visitors per month!
The next tip is to take snippets of your articles to increase social sharing.
If you look at one of our blog posts, you'll see that it's a massive list of 75 SEO tips.
In fact, this post is over 9,700 words, so the percentage of people who read the entire
article will be slim to none.
So you can splice each tip into a short snippet and you now have 75 different things to share
on your social media networks.
In fact, that's something we've done on Twitter, which has helped us generate over
9,300 social shares from just Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Turn each tip into an image, and you now have 75 posts you can share on Instagram and Pinterest.
The next tip is to partner up with complimentary businesses and do a joint webinar.
Here's how they work.
Someone from company A contacts someone in a complimentary, non-competing business, and
asks, "Hey want to do a webinar together?"
The person from Company B says, "Sure."
Then each company promotes the webinar to their respective email lists, customer lists,
or whatever promotion methods they choose.
Then when they present the webinar, they'll both teach on the set topic, incorporate their
products and expertise, and usually pitch their product at the end.
So essentially, you're helping each other promote your websites, grow your businesses,
and generate more revenue.
And this is a technique that we've been using.
We've recently joined forces with Buffer to deliver a free webinar on how to get more traffic
to your website.
Now, before you go out and start pitching random companies, I highly recommend starting
with people you know and have an existing relationship with.
So go through your inbox, and try to reconnect before asking them for a solid.
The next tip is to repurpose your content.
On a good week, it takes around 20 hours to create a piece of content for Ahrefs blog
or YouTube channel.
But rather than calling it a week, we take our content and repurpose them into different
media types.
The thing is that people have different learning styles.
Some want to watch a video and others prefer to read a blog post.
So let's take the SEO tips post again.
Almost 10,000 words of pure gold.
So we turned it into a 17 minute video with a little bit of overlap, but some different tips
that aren't included in the blog post.
Our video on local SEO takes you through a step-by-step process where you can follow
a story of ranking my local coffee shop, High-Speed Coffee, whereas the blog post gets into the
nitty gritty details of each step.
Other ways you can repurpose your content is to turn a blog post into a Slideshare presentation,
infographic, video or if you didn't start with a blog post, reverse it into one.
These are some tactics that are working for us right now at Ahrefs and some that we're
still testing.
Now make sure to like, share, and subscribe so that you can get updates on SEO and marketing
strategies that are working today.
Also, leave a comment and let me know which website promotion tip was your favorite.
Or if you have another one that I missed, I'd love to hear from you and test it out
for myself.
So keep grinding away, go and promote your website, and I'll see you in the next video.