Site Promotion is the web equivalent to Brand Awareness. It’s about getting the word out that your site exists.
Now, there’s a little confusion about the terms I’ve been using, so I figure I’ll clear that up now.
Site promotion has two different definitions. It has a holistic definition that refers to everything about getting your website known, including both SEO and non-SEO methods. (I used it in this way in my Site Promotion Plan Part Two: SEO).
Site promotion also refers just to these non-SEO methods of getting the word out about your site. It’s obviously not completely cut and dried, because “Link building” can appear in both categories (see below). In any event, for the purposes of this post I’m using Site promotion in the smaller sense.
As the diagram shows, there are several different aspects to the smaller definition of site promotion – which means there are several different ways to go about it.
I’ve already mentioned some of these in a previous post, but for the sake of completion I’ll go over each one in more detail here.
Social Networking
Social networking sites have been defined as sites focusing on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.
Twitter, MySpace and Facebook fall into this category, but there are a long list of others. Some of these focus on niches, while others are more general. If you’re looking for a fairly comprehensive list, Wikipedia has one.
How do you use these to promote your websites? This depends on the site. In general, the idea is to build a following and let the people who are following you know about the website. Link to it. Tell people about it. You can often create a specific page about your website on the social networking site and point your friends or followers directly to it.
On many of these sites, it’s often useful to have a strategy detailing how exactly you’re going to use it – and I’ll talk more about that later on.
For the sake of simplicity, I’m including smaller community-based sites (for example, Blogcatalog, which is a community of bloggers) in this category as well.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking might sound similar, but they’re quite different. The idea with these is that if people like the content on your site, they’ll bookmark it for future reference. The difference between this and just using the favourites button on your browser is that the bookmarking sites make it easy to share with others.
For a comprehensive list of the sites that fall into this category, click on the 
button at the bottom of this post.
The promotion opportunities in these sites are obvious. Every time someone bookmarks a webpage from your site, that’s another place where people could chance upon it.
To make use of it, it can be useful to include a call-to-action (like the one at the end of this post).
Real World Promotion
This one is straight-forward. If you have a website, tell people about it. If it’s a business website, include details on your business cards, all your promotional material, and everywhere else. Even if it’s a blog, you can still include its address on your emails, post flyers in mailboxes, or anything else you can think of.
Ensure any advertising that you do points to your website.
In this way, you can drive traffic to your site that might otherwise never have come across it.
Profile Building
Profile Building has overlaps with both Social Bookmarking and using Social networking sites, but is broader than both. Essentially, if you have one webpage, you have one chance for people to find it. If you have many webpages that all advertise you, you have many chances for people to find it.
It’s about establishing yourself as an authority. Write guest blog posts for related bloggers. Write articles for article directories, but don’t submit the same article to more than one. (This site lists the best article directory, of which there are hundreds.) Create a Squidoo lens. Write a Wikipedia post if your website or organisation is official. Write an article for LifeHacker. Essentially, litter the internet with pages that refer to what you’re up to.
Link Building
This is similar to profile building, but focuses on getting links to your site on other people’s sites. Obviously, the more links that are out there pointing to your site, the greater the chance people have of randomly finding your site. (As an added bonus, inbound links are also good for your PageRank, as mentioned in a previous post.)
There are several ways to do this, including:
- ask for a link
- link swapping (this isn’t so good for increasing PageRank, because Google doesn’t like it as much – but people can still follow the links)
- write comments in forums or on blog posts, with a link in the signature
- use Tynt Tracer
- write articles as above (most article directories allow links in the author’s bio).
Again, given the number of options, it’s generally a good idea to have a strategy in place.
Pay Per Click
This is the simplest of the lot. Create advertisements using one of the pay per click programmes (Google’s one is called Adwords). This can be very effective, if done correctly – but it also costs.
I’ll include banner advertising in this section just for completion. Some of these are pay per click, but many others are pay per impression. In general, pay per impression is a bad idea, because most people only look at advertisements on the web if it directly relates to what they’re looking for. Pay per impression is like paying for a billboard few people look at (refer to Jakob Neilson’s article on Banner Blindness for confirmation), whereas pay per click is paying for results. I’ll doubtless talk more about these in later posts, but that will do for now.
Summary
Given the huge variety of options available for site promotion, there’s an obvious question: which should you use?
It’s up to you. Work it out as part of your Content Strategy. All of them will work, if you do it correctly, and apply a certain amount of effort.
Over the next few posts, I’ll detail the strategy I’m using. I’ll describe what I’m doing, and why (but don’t take this to mean it’s the only way; for your website, a different approach might be better). I’ll go into details about what I intend to do in the future – and what I specifically choose not to do. Some of these choices are because I don’t think it’s right for what I’m trying to do, but some of them are because they could backfire rather badly.
I’ll keep you posted.
Oh, and one more thing. If you liked this post, bookmark it on your favourite site using the icon below. Send a tweet about it. Write me a comment, or otherwise share your thoughts about it with those you know. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.
(This is that call to action I mentioned above.)
