Tips on promoting your new website

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Today, you can still find all sorts of middle-aged forms of PR. Using word of mouth, promoting events and giving sponsorships, making press announcements, bla bla bla. That's great, but we're talking internet here. The first amazing thing you need to remember is that the internet never forgets. Links are here forever, search engines map out the entire web universe and if you spread yourself well enough, people will end up bumping into you. The question is, how can you take advantage of this? The internet offers many tools and services that are meant to make a user's life nicer. You can use these same services to raise awareness to your goal

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Optimize your free Website for Search Engines

Stick ‘SEO’ into google and you’ll get millions of links (206 million last time I checked). But often very little one knows what to actually do to optimize your website for search engines. Whether using a wix.com platform or not, here are some steps/tips we recommend:

  • Keyword Research
  • Choose your platform with Care
  • Write clean relevant text
  • Submit your Website
  • Relevant inbound links

1. Find the right keyword  If one of your goals is to drive tons of traffic to your website (which is usually the case), then Keyword & Keyword Selection Tips & Tools is incredibly important for you. “Keywords” are the words that people type in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and such. Combining popular keywords within your website infrastructure can raise the number of visitors to your site. One way to come up with keywords is simply to think about popular terms related to what that goes on in your site. For instance, if you are offering online salsa classes, you might choose the keywords salsa, dancing, dance classes, latino dancing, lame activities and so on. By including these words in your content, you can attract people that were searching for these terms on search engines.

Instead of coming up with a list of keywords off the top of your head, you can do a little bit of research and see which words are being searched for the most. There are plenty of online tools for keyword research, including the freebie Google keywords research tool. With these tools, you can find keywords that lots of people are already searching for and combine them into your content. This way, your site will appear in search results of these words.Free flash websites created with Wix are search engine friendly, so putting a little bit of effort into keyword research can really help you increase traffic and turn your site into one hot tamale

2. Choose Your Platform With Care: Before you even write a word, it’s important to ensure your Website is designed in Format that Robots can read. For most html-based sites this is a given. It is also a given with Wix. Traditionally, this is not a given with Flash. So if you are thinking of using flash - dynamic visuals being great for humans - Wix may be the solution for you. (Wix creates an html mirror of all your web content that can be read by search engine robots but is invisible to your website visitors).

3. Write Clean Relevant Text: You’ve probably heard that on the web, “content is king”. This is because although all search engines robots behave differently, the 3 largest engines (google, yahoo & msn) prefer pages with clean and relevant text. But robots don’t only read the text you write throughout your website. They also read the “page title”, “description”, and “keywords” you select for your website. Page Title is the most important element for search engines to correctly categorize your website. “Page title” is the title that appears at the top of the browser when visitors view your website. Description This is what people will read when they find your free website on search engines. As search engines typically publish only 20-30words it helps to keep your description short and sweet. Keywords: keyword selection is also critical. You may know what category/s your website occupies…but we recommend you use look up keywords being used by your market in keyword directories, and include them in your web content. Here are two great free tools for selecting keywords:

Of course you should also make sure to write for your current & potential customers…

4. Submit Your free Website: When you have finished your website, it can also help to let search engines know you exist. If you are publishing your website on your own domain, you can submit your website to the 3 major search engines by using the links below:

(If you are publishing your website with Wix hosting service, this will happen automatically.)

5. Relevant Inbound Links: “Content is king” is not the only SEO mantra. “Relevant links” is also key. From an SEO perspective, the more relevant inbound links your site has, the higher the ranking your website will receive on Search Engines. Here are a few simple ways to increase your inbound links (and help your site get promoted):

  • Add your site to Open source Web Directory Dmoz: (Note: it can take a long time for your request to be processed)
  • Create links from web directories that are relevant for your free website subject area.
  • Ask friends and clients with relevant websites to link from their website to yours.

These are just some tips for optimizing your free website for search engine robots – without compromising on the language of your customer. We hope you’ve found them helpful! If you do end up using wix feel free to ask our help for any follow on questions.

Promote your free website with MySpace Comments

MySpace is one of the world's most powerful communities. It can be a brilliant sphere to connect with users - to talk to users in their own place and their own language. But it must be done with style, otherwise, the community will eat you alive. Try and become a living part of the community. Don’t just come and throw up comments at people's profiles. MySpace users are smarter than that. They'll just ignore you, block you or humiliate you. Learn your friends and communicate with them for real. Define which users are interesting for your goal (How many friends do they have? What are their fields of interest? How old are they? What's the look&feel of their profile page?), locate them and start communicating with them. Adding people as friends and sending them a sparkling “thx 4 approving” comment won't cut it here. It's like in the real world. Friends will be friends if you spend time with them and pay attention to them. Don’t use them. Most of the time, working in SN Marketing is just being human, and it’s not as easy as you think... When writing a comment on someone's profile, make the comment is worth staying. The person you wrote to should be glad to have a comment like yours on their page. That means your MySpace comments should be attractive, funny, wicked, sweet or whatever is good for your specific audience. You can add Music, animations or other funky features that will do the trick. Wix has several great options to offer:

  • Countdown Campaign: Wix' countdown widgets allow you to post comments that will update as frequently as you wish. You can also use this widget in banners, newsletters and such. Check out how the Anarchist Music Project, A.N.A, used it on MySpace. Discover more
  • The “where i am” widget(this is my personal one):This widget tells your friends where else on the web they can find you. As you can see, I just chose specific icons (more Wix icons for more sites coming up soon) and linked them to the my personal profiles on those sites. This can enhance your relationship with your friends by bringing it to other web levels. The fun thing is that you can:
  • Customize the look of your widget with colors, special effects, sounds and more pazazz stuff.
  • Fit the size of the widget to your blog/profile/whatever.
  • Add more and more icons to your widget the moment you join a new service (and you will!). A simple click will update the widget wherever you placed it.



How to use eMarketing Materials

Today, you can still find all sorts of middle-aged forms of PR. Using word of mouth, promoting events and giving sponsorships, making press announcements, bla bla bla. That's great, but we're talking internet here. The first amazing thing you need to remember is that the internet never forgets. Links are here forever, search engines map out the entire web universe and if you spread yourself well enough, people will end up bumping into you. The question is, how can you take advantage of this? The internet offers many tools and services that are meant to make a user's life nicer. You can use these same services to raise awareness to your goal. For instance, social bookmarking services (del.icio.us, MyWeb, StumbleUpon, etc.) offer users a way to save their bookmarks, share them with friends, discover new bookmarks that may interest them and more. This is one way for you to promote yourself – by bookmarking your page and spreading it around. But here, just like on MySpace, you should use this tool carefully and with consideration to the communities' rules. So, we talked about Social Network Marketing, we talked about Social Bookmarking and we'll soon talk about Blogs and Viral Marketing, but first, here are more neat promotion tools that are available on Wix:

  • Newsletters:Let your users/friends know what goes on in your exciting world: what’s new, what's on sale, what caused a lot of commotion and so on. Choose the best frequency for your service (daily/weekly/monthly), but don't push it! If you don't really have daily updates with an added value, your users will get cranky.
  • E-card:Greet your friends and customers with something nice. Again, go easy with this one. You don't need to wish them a good morning everyday.
  • Competitions:This is a great way to generate hype. Wix can help you create and promote your web competition within your target community. Here are some super cool examples.
  • Online Exhibition:If your artistic soul is burning for recognition, you may like the idea of exhibiting your works in an online gallery. Wix allows you to create the gallery of your dreams. You can even create multiple rooms when presenting more than one artist. for example.
And when you're ready, create flyers to promote your exhibition, like this one.
  • Invitations: Promote all kinds of events by creating and distributing invitations that cannot be refused. You can edit and change your invitations anytime. You can even add pics during the event itself. An example, of course.



Promote Your Website Through Blogs

The argument about the nature of blogs (Are they the new media? Are bloggers the new journalists? Are they the messiah?) is not so interesting anymore, because the bottom line is clear – they are here to stay and they are very strong in the internet playground. If you get bloggers to support you, you have a winning ticket. Here are some points to keep in mind while talking to bloggers:

1. Know exactly what you're trying to say. Don't use your “marketing talk” with them. Be direct and honest, and don't try kiss ass.

2. Write to the right place. The “Contact Us” form is usually meant for people who don't know much about the web. Bloggers would appreciate it if you invest time to locate them. That doesn't mean you should call their cell phone or stalk them, right?

3. Try to understand who is the person you're talking to. Most of the bloggers have a “web personality” with a distinct language and character. Look at their flickr photos, read their twitter feeds, add them as friends on facebook. Not just as a tricky maneuver, but to develop a real acquaintance.

4. No template emails. Each blogger is a different person and should be addressed differently.

5. Go for quality. There are lots of great, small blogs with a loyal crowd of opinion leaders.

6. Stay in touch! Bloggers are people (usually), so be a true friend and show them that you're not only interested promotional power. Don't nag, though. If someone is not answering your emails, you should get the hint.

Promote Your Website through Viral Marketing

Viral marketing, or “guerrilla marketing”, is one of the most interesting things happening on the web today. The title is pretty much self-explanatory. You market something through spreading it like a virus. Viral marketing is usually done through social web services. It contains some elements of traditional PR, but the majority is unique to this virtual realm. There are two methods for viral marketing, and the best is to perform both at the same time:

1. Use the “internet persona of your product”. No hide and seek, no alter egos. That’s me and that’s what I do. I open profiles, talk to people and answer their questions with the intention of promoting something. This method has some advantages:

  • People get to know the real you, not a made up character that doesn't exist.
  • Honesty is very important. When you're pretending to be an enthusiastic client that can't stop recommending a certain product, people can usually tell. And they don't like it.
  • Your presence in many different sites means more links that are pointing to your site. These are organic strong links, handmade links, if you will, that will also do you good with SEO.
  • There is nothing wrong with promoting yourself when you do it in a way that contributes to the community. If your promotional profile page is well designed and well written, people will be happy to become friends with you.

2. “The Puppets” - Use other people to promote you, without identifying as company workers. The advantages of this are:

  • The voice is the voice of real people, not of a brand or company.
  • When you hire people that actually know how to operate in this world of SN, forums and so on, they blend in to the texture of the site more easily and thus have better chances to leave a mark on the community. Everyone can spot a newbie that doesn't know the rules, and when that newbie is trying to promote something, it gets ugly.
  • It takes time to really built strong connections within a community, but when it happens - it's irreplaceable. If your people have strength in a community, other users will listen to what they have to say.
  • You can also use these minions for other important aspects of guerrilla marketing: read blogs, add comments, work on a many different SN ,get to know the opinion leaders and more.

3. Marketing research, marketing research, Marketing research. It’s so important that I can’t even stress how much. Marketing research is the base that your legs are standing on. It’s your eyes and your ears. Your medulla oblongata. You should know everything there is to know about your field of operation, otherwise – no one will get to know you.

4. Internet demography – Your place of residence and your father's occupation are irrelevant here. The demography that counts is which SN you're using, which music service you listen to and which glitter-MySpace-template you like. It’s a totally different landscape, and you need to learn it. How? Well,:

  • Define your audience. Yes, All of god’s children ARE your audience, but let's be more specific, mmmmk? With time, the users will teach you more than you think about your real target audience, but you need to come up with an initial definition that will help you focus your efforts.
  • Why do you want these specific users? It’s an important question. Because they can pay? Because they are opinion leaders? Because your product can change their lives? The answer/s to this question will help you set up your communication strategy with the users.
  • Be viral – Ok, it's hard to define exactly what does “viral” mean, but there are some things that can help you become more like that. Make sure that if a user wants to spread your items, they have the bestest ways to do it (share by email, via SN, by embedding code and such).
  • After you completed all of the above, you can try the oldskool thing – your friends. “I’ve got a friend” is one of the oldest, most efficient marketing tricks. Forward your site to everyone you know, and who knows where it will end up?

Drive Traffic to your website

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks and content websites like blogs. It's a very simple procedure - advertisers pay the site owners only when a user actually clicks on an advertisement to visit the website they're promoting. With search engines, advertisers usually bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. When a user types a keyword query matching to the advertiser's keyword list or views a webpage with relevant content, the ads appear on some location on the page. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and you will bump into them no matter what you do online. These are the “special” links that appear near or above the "natural" results when you search for something on google. You can also find them on blogs, forums and many other virtual landscapes. Content websites usually charge a fixed price for a click rather than use the bidding mechanism common on search engines.

PPC Advertising 101:PPC advertising is an excellent tool to drive traffic into your free website. Since you pay only for actual clicks, you can control your budget and fit it to your needs. Basically, with PPC you attract users who search for the terms that fit your groove. The principle is very easy. Suppose you are a web designer, looking to create Wix sites for potential small businesses in your area of Tallahasee, Florida. That means your target market are fellow Tallahasians who need flash web designers that work with small businesses. So the keywords you would bid on are “flash designers”, “designing business websites”, “Tallahasee web design” and so on.

PPC Advantages:PPC advertising has several advantages on other forms of online advertising. Like:

  • You choose your price. You decide exactly how much you're going to spend by limiting your budget. For search engine advertising, you can choose a different price for every keyword you bid on. Clever advertisers find ways to optimize their bids and keep their costs low.
  • You decide where&when. With PPC advertising, you can be very specific about where you want your ads to appear, you have total control over your keywords at all times and you can make changes on a daily basis. The keywords work for you, chief.
  • You pay only for success. The most amazing thing about PPC is that you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and visits your site. Each click is an opportunity to convert your visitors into happy customers. Other forms of advertising make you pay even if the visitor never actually makes it to your site. Not cool.

Attract the right people:If you want to bring the right crowd to your site, you shall use a keyword research tool. It will help you choose the best keywords for your target market. Try using google's tool. It's pretty decent. Remember that tons of clicks are not always a good thing. If you use keywords that are as specific as possible to your target market, you will receive more useful clicks and you won't have to pay for users who visited your site for 2 seconds and left.

Discover CTR wisdom:

Create landing pages: A landing page is the mini site that appears when someone clicks on your ad. Landing pages are meant to “continue the dialogue” with the clicking users and turn them into customers. With Wix, you can easily design any marketing landing page for users who clicked on your PPC ads. Attractive, effective and creative landing pages will optimize the users' clicks and raise the KaChing potential of each visit. You can even create multiple landing pages and keep things more interesting.

Using landing pages is also good for SEO purposes. Insert the proper keywords for your target market, add links to pages that you wish to promote and highlight important terms in the title. This doesn't mean your landing page should look like the “SEO for Beginners” exercise book. Keep the content high, otherwise it just won't work.

If you want the landing page to be highly productive, make sure it speaks the same language as the ad that leads to it. The design and the content of the landing page should correlate to those of the ad. Users who clicked on your ad did so because it raised their interest, so give them what they're looking for.

Offline Promotion - Because the Real World Still Exists

Viral marketing, search engine optimization, social networking optimization, PPC campaigns... There are many cute ways to drive traffic to your free website on the actual web, but since the internet is not separate from life, there's also plenty that can be done offline to encourage people to visit your website. Straight out of the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, here are a few methods for promoting your site in the real world:

1. Whether we like it or not, the old way of spreading news by talking to as many people as possible is still very relevant. Think about it for a second. How do you know Facebook, google or MySpace? Someone shared their existence with you at the office, at school, over dinner or whatever. Let the world discover your new free website by telling the folks you know about it and ask them to spread the word. Make sure your domain name is easy and catchy, so people will remember it easily.

2. Do you have a business, personal or mobile contact card? Surely, you must add your new  website address to it. And don't just write it at the bottom. It should appear in a visible and valuable location, like right under your name or at the back of the card. An example:

Alfred Pennyworth
www.WebWonders.com
Make Website  is Wonderful
123 Wayne St., Gotham City, 10245
Tel: (random meaningless numbers)

3. Add your new website address to your details on the local Yellow Pages guide. Believe it or not, people actually still use that thing. For instance, If your business teaches people how to build websites, a URL on your Yellow Pages ad is a brilliant method of introducing potential clients to your work.

4. If you have envelopes, papers, postcards or any kind of stationary with a layout printed on it, add your website address to the template. Again, you must choose a good location for it. Don't count on people to heavily concentrate on your Christmas cards.

5. If you're doing an offline campaign, make sure you include your website address in it. People are getting used to searching for URL's on posters, street ads, TV commercials and even on radio jingles.

Don't forget that if someone heard about your site offline and chose to give it a try, they need something in return for their effort. Creating a website is not enough. Your design, content and overall web experience should be prime stuff. Wix provides you with all the tools you need to build a stunning website for free, so use them. It's easy.

See also

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