Essential Website Marketing Strategies

Marketing a Website Is Easy with the
Right Website Marketing Tools

With the right website marketing strategies and website marketing tools, marketing a website easily becomes successful.

Website marketing actually consists of two different concepts... the marketing of your website AND using a website to market (your product/service, affiliate products). So, in this section of the site, we'll look at both areas of web marketing, also known as internet marketing. The strategies are mostly the same.

Marketing and sales are often thought of by newbie entrepreneurs as having a negative connotation. But the fact is, the only way to make a home business website successful is to complete a sale of some kind. And that's the point of marketing or promoting a website, product or service. You are building a successful online home business, right?

Many people worry that it will cost money to use website marketing strategies, money they won't have for a long time. While it's true that some website marketing methods cost money, there are also many low cost or no cost methods and website marketing tools you can use too. I'll try to point you in the direction of as many of those as I can, but remember that any successful business will require a certain amount of investment... as measured by time, effort... and yes, dollars.

One last point before you begin to explore the various website marketing strategies listed below... website promotion is all about getting noticed. The initial way your site will get noticed is in the search engine listings and in other venues for building traffic. So, be sure you have thoroughly understood the concepts in the building website traffic section before you move on.

Top Website Marketing Strategies

As with the traffic building methods covered in the previous section, it's not wise to try to employ all the website marketing methods listed here at once. Master one before you move on to the next. Pick and choose the strategies that make the most sense for you, your skills, your interests and your business.

Before I get into the nitty gritty... I just want to encourage you to use social media as much as you can. Through social media, you can get others to market your site for you. Have you noticed the "Share this page" button bar at the bottom of all my pages on this site? That enables my readers to easily share my site with their friends, family and followers, without any effort at all from me (other than placing the share code on all my pages). I'll never forget when I first found out I was getting traffic through StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking service I didn't even know existed at the time. It helped me reach a whole other audience. Cool!

Press Releases

Press releases are a way to submit information about your niche and your offerings to the world, through media. The ideas is to make your announcement newsworthy in a succinct way and then disseminate it. If it's interesting enough, news websites and producers all over the Web will pick up your announcement and publish it.

With the right template, writing a press release is not too hard and it's a low cost way to get your sales message in front of the whole world.

Learn about how to write a press release and publish it

Building a List

Having a mailing list of people interested in your website, your product, and/or your service is one of the most effective wand lucrative ways to market a website. Not only is it a way to keep your site in the forefront of their minds and bring them back over and over... you can also get them to buy from you in the future.

People who are subscribed to a list may also share the information you send them (provided it is valuable) with others, so that is another method of passive marketing that can really work well.

Learn some strategies for building a responsive list of subscribers

Free and Paid Advertising

Placing small classified ads online on websites, in eZines and other online locations is yet another low – or no – cost way of getting the word out.

Ads can be as little as a title and a short blurb about your site, service or product, or they can be more extensive, like articles. Different ad formats are appropriate in different venues. It's important to understand where to use the various types.

Learn more about advertising your website for little or no cost

Pay Per Click Advertising

Google Adwords is the most well-known pay per click form of advertising, but it's not your only option. This is a high risk website marketing strategy, though, unless you know what you are doing. It's very easy to rack up hundreds of dollars of PPC fees pretty darn quick, if you don't stay on top of it.

However, it is also possible to get the word out across a broad spectrum pretty fast by using PPC advertising. So, if you have the budget and time to stay on top of it, it's definitely worth experimenting with pay per click.

Learn how to make pay per click work for you

Offline Promotion

Although it seems most intuitive to market an online home business online, there are offline, or local, methods you can use too. Of course, word of mouth has always been one of the most powerful forms of offline promotion. But that's sometimes hard to get going with an online home business.

Did you know you can get some local business by advertising over the Web? Strictly speaking, that's not the same thing as offline marketing, but it IS very different from all of the other methods we've covered here.

Learn how you can get your regional community interested in what your website has to offer

In Summary...

One last note... if you're going to be marketing a product or service, you're probably going to need some kind of sales letter. You can write it yourself or hire a freelancer to do it for you. Either way, there are some important concepts you'll need to nail down first. See our writing a professional salesletter page for more information.

As you can see, there are many different website marketing strategies you can use to market a website. Be sure to check out the website marketing tools on our Resources page too.