Drive visitors to your website with free advertising30 March 2005
There are lots of free methods that you can use to attract visitors to your web site.
First, make sure your site is worth visiting. Ensure potential customers will want to visit and revisit. People are attracted to sites that offer interesting content, rather than just advertising. Consider offering:
- free advice or useful hints and tips
- interactive material, such as surveys or competitions
- regularly updated news
- links to further information
Start a weblog
Consider launching a weblog (or 'blog'). Weblogs work like an online diary, with the most recent entry presented first, and like a diary are informal, containing comments, hyperlinks and personal opinions. The website of bespoke tailor Thomas Mahon, English Cut, is a good example.
Most weblogs allow visitors to comment on your entries, giving you valuable customer feedback. They're also a useful way of boosting your search engine ranking, as search engines like fresh content. Common blogging services includes TypePad and Blogger.
Writing press releases
You can also drive traffic to your web site by making the most of the free publicity that is on offer via the media (for example local newspapers, radio or trade magazines). The easiest way of doing this is to send out a press release by email.
Make sure your press release is interesting, newsworthy (not just an advert!), and has a human interest angle. You could talk about an unusual customer or product, conduct a customer survey, run a competition or tie in with a holiday such as Christmas or Mother's Day.
Give your press release a short, snappy headline, and make sure the most important information is in the first couple of paragraphs (one idea per paragraph works best). Make it lively, but leave out the flowery words. Most importantly, include your contact details and web site address, and be available to answer either emails or a phone call.
Don't send your press release as an attachment - it may get blocked by the recipient's email filtering software. Instead, include the text within the body of your email. Check that you have an up to date email address for the organisation you're submitting the release to.
More free publicity
Other free methods of advertising your web site include:
- Ensuring that your website address is on all your offline publicity materials - for example letterhead, business cards.
- Becoming an expert on your subject, and offering to write a column or article for your local newspaper or trade association web site - of course including your web address.
- Approaching other non-competing web sites and requesting a reciprocal link from their site to yours (for example, if you were a wine retailer, you could approach a wine school). This will also help your search engine rankings, which are often based on numbers of incoming links.
- Commenting on forums and other people's blogs. Avoid out-and-out promotion. Just include your web address in your comment and people may follow it up and visit your web site.
