How To Promote Your Website: 15 Marketing Experts Weigh In
Traffic is everywhere… when you know how to promote your website.
And everyone knows that serious traffic turns into serious monthly revenue.
So that’s great and all, but, almost no one knows how to get enough qualified traffic to their site!
The good news is, if you’re not in the know, you don’t have to go far to learn what the professionals do to make a killing.
Today, I interviewed 15 digital marketing experts with one simple question: What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
They graciously took time out of their day to respond, and their replies are below.
15 Experts Teach You How To Get Major Traffic
1. Joanna Carter – Smart Insights
Website: smartinsights.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
There is no singular strategy that has worked best for driving an increase in traffic, in our experience at least. What has worked best has been integrating our SEO strategy with our PPC activities.
Delivering high-quality, keyword-focused content across our site – in terms of both landing pages and blogs – will always be an important part of improving rankings. Now that only 50% of searches results in a click on Google, this is more important than ever, as you are more likely to get that click if you are at the top of results.
However, if people aren’t aware of your brand, they are less likely to click on your site, even if it is high-ranking. Searchers are much more likely to visit a brand they recognize, which is where PPC comes in.
Targeting your PPC on keywords you are working on as part of your SEO strategy can help bring traffic to your site but also raise brand awareness. If searchers start to recognize your brand from your search ads, there is a greater chance that they will head to your site from organic search.
This integration – as well as the constant refinement and re-targeting of both your SEO and PPC strategies – should help you grow your traffic over time. Although you should also be making use of other channels, such as email and social media, to ensure you are targeting your audience wherever they are.
2. Dennis Yu – BlitzMetrics
Website: blitzmetrics.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
I boost Facebook posts, usually promoting blog posts that I believe are super valuable to my audience– not just some sales page.
Spend $1 per day on these posts for 7 days each to determine which ones are winners. Boost 3 per week, so that you’re spending $100 a month testing and driving site traffic at the same time.
Over time, you’ll see a pattern of what turns into customers. And then you can put more money on these winning posts, spending money profitably– not needing to continue to post on social and web over and over again– while getting no traffic and no sales from that effort.
PRO TIP– organize your content into a Topic Wheel so that your website is not some separate platform from your social, email, and other channels.
3. Brian Robben – Founder, Robben Media
Website: robbenmedia.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
We focus on ranking in the top three results of Google for long tail keywords our prospective customers search. And doing so has been an absolute game changer.
For example, our rankings and traffic has soared, and we’ve gained many local customers, by targeting keywords that are local and describe our services.
By asking more specific and direct questions, such as “What are our ideal customers specifically searching and what information do they desire?,” we discover specific keywords. This gives us the framework to create the best content on the internet. Where a more vague question “What do we need to do to get more traffic?” leaves you reaching for short-term gimmicks and ultimately landing where you started.
Invest in understanding your website’s traffic potential and start ranking first for “ready to buy” keywords your customers are searching. Then you’ll have more traffic, and more people wanting to work with you, than you can handle.
4. Cornelia Cozmiuc – Cognitive SEO
Website: cognitiveseo.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
I would say content marketing but with a twist.
Ranking on Google’s top positions is becoming harder and harder every day. And this is because there are a lot of ranking factors that are not under your direct control. The competition in Google is made up of mega-brands like Wikipedia, Forbes, and Entrepreneur. So, can small brands and businesses stand a chance in front of these giants?
Yes, but you need to have a puncher’s chance against these huge authority sites. Off-page factors like links are not in our direct control. And even if they were, it’s almost impossible to keep up with the link amount a big brand is getting.
The solution stands in the ranking factors that we can control, such as content. With Google focusing more on semantic search, the content remains a huge ranking factor. And, unlike backlinks, for instance, content is in your full control.
The twist here is to write well-optimized content for both the users and for the search engines but highly, highly based on the user search intent.
Before you begin writing, figure out the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? What are they trying to achieve through their search? Are they trying to figure out the answer to a question or do they want to reach a specific website?
If the keywords you want to rank for have clear and consistent intent behind them, you can tailor your content format and structure to be the best possible match for that intent. Search intent should dictate the type of content you create.
5. Nathan Gotch – GotchSEO
Website: gotchseo.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
The most effective tactic I’ve used is SEO. It does take the longest to pick up steam, but it dominates all other channels in the long-term.
When you stack SEO, remarketing, and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), you build a potent lead generation machine.
That nuance is important because relying on SEO as your only lead generation channel is tough. You need other lead sources because there can be a level of volatility when it comes to organic search performance. I recommend stacking Google and social media ads (like Facebook) to get some early traction while your SEO campaign is picking up steam.
Then continue to optimize your transactional page for maximum conversions.
6. Robbie Richards
Website: robbierichards.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
Crowdsourced content has been very effective in driving traffic to my site. Specifically, creating roundups like this post where you reach out to experts or influencers in a given niche and get them to provide insights around a topic that is highly relevant to your audience. I’ve ranked dozens of articles and driven hundreds of thousands of readers to my personal and client websites using roundups.
For roundups to work, you need to have:
- The right topic – what topics will your audience care about?
- The right question – what questions can you ask that makes it easy for experts to answer, but still gets them to provide valuable insights?
- The right experts – which experts can provide value, have a large audience, and a proven track record of sharing content?
- The right structure – how do you organize the content so that it is easy for readers to extract value from the content?
There is a lot that can be unpackaged there. If you want to dive deeper into my process, check out this in-depth guide I read on the Digital Marketer blog. It goes through each of the items in greater detail.
If you plan, publish and promote a quality roundup, you can not only rank for a lot of keywords, but also get people with larger audiences to share your content/brand with their audience. Authority by association!
7. Bill Slawski – SEO by the Sea
Website: seobythesea.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
The most effective thing I did to drive traffic to my site was uncovering an assignment of over 1,000 patents from IBM to Google, which I found on the USPTO Website one day.
I went through those, and found all of the ones that involved search and search engines, and wrote a blog post about the assignment, and about 15 patents that I thought were most interesting among them.
My post was linked to from some major sources such as the New York Times magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, CNN, and many other media sources (more than a few thousand) for a period of about 2-3 weeks. So providing newsworthy information that a lot of people might be interested in and find value in sharing, can capture a lot of attention.
8. Devesh Khanal – Grow and Convert
Website: growandconvert.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
There are three things that have worked for us for site promotion (2 are free, 1 is paid):
1. Communities – Find communities (FB groups, LinkedIn groups, sites like Hacker News, Product Hunt, Indie hackers, newsletters etc.) where your target audience already hangs out, establish a presence and relationship there and promote your best articles/resources very carefully and tactfully there. This is not a quick win method (minus maybe product hunt). It requires time to build genuine connections and relationships.
2. SEO: This is tried and true but people are scared of it or don’t think it will work for them. Focus not on head keywords (more difficult to get) but rather focus on long tail keywords that are genuine pain points of your target audience, this will let you rank faster for them and get visitors that are in need of what you are offering at the exact moment they are searching for it. Also SEO is evergreen traffic, it’s not one shot. It also gets easier over time. The more you rank, the more people link to you, which further helps rankings.
3. Paid: For orgs with some marketing budget, consider spending a few hundred dollars a month promoting your key content resources to targeted audiences on Facebook. We’ve seen click costs as low as $0.15. So you can drive a few thousand visitors from a few hundred dollars. FB let’s you target really specifically as well which is nice. This can get good initial exposure from the right people.
9. Keri Jaehnig – Idea Girl Media
Website: ideagirlmedia.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
I know you will get different answers than mine. But my most effective tactic has been: Playing the long game. Being an authentic marketing professional offering real, actionable insight to those seeking answers. That, paired with working a strategy that built website authority over time.
To give more detail, I’ve used a multiple-prong approach:
- Blogging from my own website – Answering key questions
- Using social media to share that information to the world
- Guest posting to broaden audience & earn backlinks
- Accepting guest posts – Heightens interest & broadens audience
- Participating in groups & online forums to bring brand/website awareness, as well as more eyeballs to my content
- Collaborated with other quality professionals to share niche content
- Partnerships with some content providers to bring information of key interest to my blog subscribers
Of course, I use tools to strengthen some of those processes. Additionally, I optimize EVERY blog post on my site.
At first, I struggled to be found online. That is normal. But playing the long game has paid off, as now my blog posts and articles are found quite often via Google Search. Those that contact my business quite often report finding me in that way. Which is the reason I blog and guest post.
10. Sydney Liu – Commaful
Website: commaful.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
Community building has been the biggest driver of our growth.
The best part about community is that it often facilitates its own growth, creates its own rules, and informs many product decisions.
If you’re starting a community, it’s important to set the culture of the community early. That starts with being very careful who you bring into the community early. Every new person shapes the culture and thus it’s important to curate the early members wisely.
11. Margaret Molloy – Siegel+Gale
Website: siegelgale.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
Be a resource, not a pitch person. Create useful content that your target audience wants.
Useful content is never promotional, instead, it answers your audience’s questions. Be sure to amplify the content on social media and optimize it for search engines.
12. Chase Dimond – Boundless Labs
Website: boundlesslabs.io
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
The tactic that has proven to be the most successful in driving traffic to my site has been cold email.
I send highly targeted and relevant cold emails to businesses and influencers that I’ve sourced from Instagram.
For influencer campaigns, I send cold emails at scale and get them to fill out a Typeform. I’ve collected tens of thousands of responses via Typeform over the past few years.
For client acquisition for my agency, I’ve acquired dozens of clients via cold email outreach. As mentioned, I source business data via Instagram and send them personalized emails letting them know about the value I can provide for them.
13. Josh Durham – Groove Life
Website: groovelife.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
I’ve had tons of success running traffic to sites with Facebook ads.
I’ve been able to send millions of visitors to websites while growing revenue profitably and predictably.
14. Summer Crenshaw – tilr
Website: tilr.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
Having a give first mentality is key to attracting website traffic. One of the best tactics is utilizing your blog to recognize others for their contribution in or around your industry.
Are you a startup? Recognize the startups in a top 5 list for cities you are expanding to.
New competitor or adjacent business come up with a new approach? Recognize them in a way that compliments the growth of your mutual industry.
Giving recognition attracts visitors interested in you and also exposes new visitors to your brand.
15. Mike Auton
Website: mikeauton.com
What tactic has performed the best for promoting your website?
To answer this question, you first have to know WHY you’re sending people to your website and WHO is your ideal client.
Anyone can get a bunch of people to follow a link and land on your website, but very few people consider this question and develop a strategy that actually gets the attention, visits or traffic required to help you reach this very specific person.
Now, as strange as it may seem for someone who’s been heavily (and successfully) involved in the digital marketing scene since 2007, my main focus this year has been increasing my offline activity to improve my online results.
I got away from my desk… I networked… I joined associations… I met, talked and developed professional relationships with actual human beings… face to face.
It was kinda weird, but very worthwhile.
It meant that a new kind of person was visiting my website: someone who actually knew me personally and was far more likely to turn into my ideal client.
I also did a ton of free branding content for social media with – get ready for this – no call to action.
The result?
More higher quality site visitors who CAME LOOKING FOR ME.
These were guys who were already warmed up by liking my helpful content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc and WANTED to give me their hard earned money to help them with their marketing needs.
Of course I also ran a lot of Facebook ads for various promotions, but the above strategies were by far the most effective for me this year, even though they are the hardest to track.
So, to all my fellow desk jockeys, remember there’s a big world out there and it can pay off to go into it from time to time :)
Conclusion
How epic was that?
For next steps, I encourage you to try three methods from above to start. After a few months, evaluate what’s working and what’s not using SEO metrics. Then, experiment the next three tactics until you exhaust this list.
When doing this, the goal is to continue doing what’s working and stopping what’s yielding zero results.
Sticking to this strategy is exactly how to promote your website and grow your business… and there’s nothing better than that!
What’s your favorite method for driving website traffic?
