If you’ve taken the time and invested money into developing your business website then it’s time to get on with marketing it. You haven’t spent all that time for nothing. Let people know that your business exists and start growing your sales.

Learning the best ways to market your website isn’t as hard as you’d expect either. All it takes is a few integral steps and a few minor, more optional ones and you’ll be well on your way to sustained web traffic growth and ongoing sales.

Let’s take a look below at how you can learn the ins and outs of marketing your new or existing website.

Enroll in SEO Short Courses

One of the first tasks that you’ll want to focus on is the optimisation of your website’s layout and its content keywords. This is SEO and it is basically the process of boosting a website’s ability to be found in searches, like Google.

With that said, you should first focus on learning the basics of SEO in a short online course and using your knowledge from that to support you in improving your site’s SEO. A few things you should do after this are to edit content that is already on your site, make sure that it is relevant to your target customers and also to ensure the website is easy to navigate. This will make your site easier to index for search engines and let your customers find your services easier.

In the beginning, you might feel as though SEO is pointless or far too time consuming to offer a great return, but it really one of the best and most essential steps to building a heavily-visited and highly profitable website. When you first start focusing on SEO, you should expect to see some major results in around six months. Don’t be worried if results aren’t immediate.

Enrol in a Marketing Course

If you’re interested in strengthening your skills in marketing overall, then a marketing course is going to be one of the best ways to learn the ins and out of marketing your website. You’ll be able to get a deep insight into all of the latest marketing trends, how to use correct language to entice customers, which channels work best for your product or service and much more.

There are a number of different types of marketing courses to choose from too. You’re not stuck with a three or four-year Bachelor Degree. You will find that on education providers like Upskilled, you can enrol in a number of different marketing courses from Short Courses to Advanced Diplomas and everything in-between.

Explore Shareable Content from Other Brands

Another great way to market your website is to transform it into a hub for relevant content that people actually want to share. That means you should focus on providing blogs and articles that are relevant to the services or products that you are selling. This way your website’s users will be inclined to read these posts and they might even be more motivated to purchase something from your site.

Aside from additional sales though, you’ll also be able to use this content strategy as a way to attract more traffic to your website. It’ll simply work by taking up more web space – giving search engines more content to index – but also you’ll notice that the content is more likely to be shared by readers, resulting in more eyes on your website.

Sign Up for Email Marketing Short Courses

To most people, email marketing is a thing of the past. It usually comes across as spammy, annoying and almost entirely irrelevant. That’s why it may come as a surprise that it’s still one of the most personal and effective ways to reach out to current customers. Many web users need more than one push to buy a product or sign up for a service and email marketing is the best way to do this.

Be sure to have an ‘Opt-in’ window front and centre on your site’s home page and subpages so that users can easily sign up for your emails. It’s also a good idea to invest in some professional classes to teach you how to send effective and engaging emails so that each contact isn’t wasted.

Once all of that is complete, you can utilise your mailing list to show off new products, blogs and article posts as well as your updates and any events.

Research the Basics of Social Media Marketing

Although this might seem a little obvious – many business owners still forget about it. If you have a business website, you should certainly have all of the top social media networks connected to it. That means a business Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and possibly even YouTube account for advertising and content creation.

When marketing your website is concerned, you’ll need to use these social platforms as a channel to pull in as many users as possible to your website. Content, product showcases and the majority of generic posts should direct your follower base to your website. Then you’ll be giving your followers an easy way to visit, providing your website with the best chance at success.

Another major perk of social media presence is the fact that you’ll be able to directly interact with your clients and customers. Questions can be answered in real-time and simply seeing a social media account generates far more trust in consumers.

Tip: Do your best to keep content relevant but also on trend. More on that below.

Learn to use Google Trends Data

The content that you create for your website is essentially the driving force behind how popular and visible your website is. That means that you should invest time in researching what current events are occurring as well as what people are searching online. This is where Google Trends comes in handy. You’ll be able to use the platform to see what people are searching most each day and you can tailor your content to that.

If there is a major event like a new episode of Game of Thrones, for example, you can use the immense web traffic to your advantage. Post on your social platforms and tag the TV show, create blog posts with Game of Thrones keywords and also make sure to keep the content fairly relevant to your services. By doing this you’ll likely see a major jump in your web traffic and thus grow your website’s audience.

Take Advantage of Public Relations Activities

To successfully grow an audience and your reputability at the same time, you must focus on developing and implementing public relations strategies. Doing this will show consumers that you are the most reputable and trustworthy business in your niche and you’ll soon see a gradual but ongoing growth of consumers coming to your website for answers and information.

A good place to start your PR journey is to design your content and your services to become a source of information for news and media outlets to use. This way they will be linking back to your website and will be providing their (often very large) audiences with a direct path to get to your website. Once you’ve built up a good reputation with media outlets, you’ll be able to utilise their network and put out press releases for your new products and services – bringing even more eyes to your site.

Turn to Business Socials like LinkedIn

Not many business owners know that LinkedIn boasts a massive publishing platform which is connected to hundreds of millions of users. You can use this platform to advertise your website to relevant consumers. On top of this, LinkedIn is also home to countless courses and eLearning classes that can be used by website owners like yourself, to teach you how to better reach relevant audiences and grow your website.

It’s best to spend plenty of time developing content for LinkedIn as its users expect only the highest quality and most useful content. Don’t forget to link your website and talk about your products and services in your posts and you’ll soon see an influx of users heading over to your website.

Learn to Advertise Through Facebook Blueprint

Turning away from the free and organic marketing options, you also have the ability to learn about and use Facebook’s global network to market your website. It’s best to take a short course on Facebook marketing from outside services or even Facebook’s own Blueprint eLearning service. This way you will have a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

A good place to start with advertising your website on Facebook is to get it primed and ready for an influx of users. Try advertising a product on Facebook that is relevant to your target audience. This way all of your new users will be relevant and you’ll have a better chance at seeing a positive return.

Focus on Building a Strong Brand Image

The world’s largest companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their brand image every year and it’s no surprise why. A strong brand enables consumers to instantly recognise your company from a single glance at a website, ad or document. It builds trust among consumers and eventually pushes consumers to purchase your products and services. A lot of branding knowledge will be taught to you in a marketing course, though it’s not essential to enrol in a course to become great at branding.

A good place to start your business’s branding is developing a whole suite of branded materials for your consumers to see. That means your website should have a distinct colour and font that matches your business email footer. It’s also essential to make sure your paid advertisements match your website’s look and feel. This way consumers will know exactly which brand that ad belongs to.

Reach out to Similar Websites

Another excellent way to build an audience and improve your website’s perceived trustworthiness is to connect and collaborate with other websites that are similar to yours. This works best if your website is a blogging or article sharing site, though it’ll work well if you’re selling a product or service too.

Spend some time online looking for businesses that are similar to yours and share similar content and ask whether they’d like to be featured on your website and if they will allow your content to be featured on theirs. By doing this you’ll be tapping into another audience that has already been built and matches your target market.

Learn the Ins and Outs of Video Marketing

If you have been researching marketing for a while, you will know already that video is by far the fastest growing advertising medium for businesses. It’s engaging, fosters an emotional connection with viewers and is far more likely to be shared than any other type of media. Utilise platforms like YouTube, IGTV and Vimeo for your video content marketing and be sure to add all relevant links in the description of the video. This way your viewers can easily click through to your website.

It’s also a good idea to use videos to reach out to other audiences and bring them to your website. Most marketing channels have a different type of consumer or web user, and by expanding from blogs, images and video content you’ll be able to reach as many of these people as possible.

Learn to Utilise Sharing Platforms

If you’re developing content for your website in order to grow your audience, then you have to look for online avenues to share it. Don’t invest in blogs, articles and other content if no one is reading it. Set up accounts with online blogging and news platforms like Flipboard, Medium and Fast Company. This way, once your content is approved, you’ll be tapping into a massive audience of millions of people who are specifically interested in the content you put out.

You should also make sure that your content on these platforms is modified and optimised to market your website. This means using tags correctly, researching keywords for the posts and also showcasing as much about your website as you possibly can, without it sounding too stuffy.

Explore Web Design Auditing or Hire Someone

You might find that after all of your hard work marketing your site that people are still only spending a few minutes on your site on a single page and then leaving. This is where web design becomes an essential marketing tool. A website must be engaging, easy to navigate and showcase any and all information that users might be looking for. Don’t forget that the design of your website is still a major process in the marketing of the site, so don’t take the design lightly.

The latest design trends for web design focus around effortless navigation, a lot of neutral space as well as plenty of imagery and transition animations. No matter how vigorously you market the website, people will leave if it looks like it was last updated a decade ago.

Examine Influencer Platforms

The last five years have seen the rise of influencer marketing. All brands, big and small, are reaching out to celebrity influencers to promote their products, services, websites, charities and almost everything in-between. Do some research into which influencers are most likely going to have audiences interested in your industry and your product and reach out to them.

The key focal point is the audience. If you’re a makeup brand, you won’t want to advertise with a technology influencer, so be sure to do some research into each influencer’s audience. Give the influencer a topic to speak about and have all links and information readily available in the content being shared and you’ll be able to see exactly how your investment in an influencer performed when marketing your website.

The Takeaway

To sum up, for you to learn the ins and outs of marketing your website you’ll need to look at all available opportunities and spend time understanding how to capitalise on them. That means learning how to use Facebook Ads or spending some time researching the best content for your brand. Once you’ve got a good insight into a certain marketing activity and you’ve learned how it works, you can then begin building your audience and expanding your website’s reach.