AdlandPro Website Success Course – 5 – Website promotion Part 1

We are on river Indus in the area of Karakorum, Pakistan

Review previous lesson here..

Before spending time and money on promotion, it’s worth going through a short checklist to make sure you’re ready to promote the products and services you have selected  or developed:

Is Your Website Ready for Visitors?
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1. You have good products and services supported by good sales copy.

2. Your website is easy to navigate and well laid out with an appealing design.

3. It is clear to your visitors what the focus of your website is.

4. Your website hosting is stable and able to support the volume of visitors that your promotions will target.

5. You are not anonymous and provide your visitors with disclosures that will give them confidence of your credibility:

– Your contact details, including a physical location and telephone number is recommended.

– You have an easy-to-find statement relating to the Privacy of information you request visitors to enter in forms on your site,

– A statement relating to security for transactions entered into on your site. If security is provided by third parties (like Paypal, for example) state this – it provides confidence that transactions will be carried out on secure servers.

6. Your webpages are complete with no “dead” links, and meta tags for keywords and descriptions placed for search engines.

Finally, are YOU ready?
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Your attitude must be focused on success, the provision of service and support to your visitors – and committed to allocate the time required for promotional processes.

Let’s go then!

Mechanisms of Promotion
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First of all – promotion is about exposure, not just selling. What you are focused on is to expose your products and services (through the medium of your promotion) to the correct audience. The correct audience is the prospective buyers of the products and services that you are promoting.

The more targeted your promotion – the better YOUR result will be.

The objective of your promotion, at the most basic level, is to get a viewer of your ad, banner, article, email – whatever… to click on a link .

That link may take the viewer (among other things) to:

– your website home page, or a webpage on your website

– sales copy for a product or service you earn commission from

– the signup page for a program you get a referral benefit from

– a subscription form for a newsletter, course or report (or this can be done direct via an email link to an autoresponder)

The BIG question of promotion, then – is how and where do you place YOUR links to expose them to your target audience?

There is no single promotional element that will provide for all your promotional needs. A combination of methods must be used to create a balanced campaign that reaches prospective buyers over a range of different media.

You must also consider the “lifetime” of links that you place – it might just be there for an hour, a day – or sometimes only seconds, as is the case with much email promotion, that is only a subject line away from the delete button.

The longer that your link remains, the greater the exposure potential is.

PROMOTIONAL MEDIA
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We now look briefly at some of the key media for internet promotion:

Search Engines:
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Search engines use many methods to index and rank websites, they vary from one to another, and they constantly change. Most are keyword-driven to a large extent, and some of the most important engines also draw relationships between keywords and the content of your website. For some, the number of links pointing to your website is also a factor as this can indicate site popularity.

Search engines will pick up keywords from the meta tag on your webpages when they “spider” the web – either independantly, or following the submission of your webpage URL to them.

Competition for keywords is intense, so you should choose them carefully; there is little point in competing for listing and ranking, as an example, for the keyword “free” against many well established, highly ranked websites.

Similarly, there is often little value in having the top ranking for an obscure keyword that is seldom searched -although you could be sure that any clicks that came your way would be well-targeted.

Most search engines allow submission of single words or phrases as keywords (but, as many databases don’t like spaces we suggest you use an underscore (_) in any keyword phrases.)

Many new marketers make the mistake of submitting too frequently to search engines – often using every free submission service that they find. This can not only result in your webpage being banned for “search engine spamming” – but produce a huge volume of confirmation emails that also add you to many different mailing lists. This makes YOU the promotional target and the mail will come (frustratingly) day after day.

Of paramount importance is the relationship between your keywords and your webpage content. This measurement by search engines is called “keyword density” and it looks at how many times a keyword appears in the content of your page. This is not to say that simply repeating the keywords over and over will improve your ranking – in fact a density that is too high is likely to damage your chances. A maximum density of 4-5% is recommended.

Gateway pages are also used by many marketers, but care needs to be taken not to have too many of these on one domain.
A gateway page simply focuses on a single keyword, using a single page of content that has a high density of the keyword in the content text. Again, don’t overuse this as it could work
against you.

Also, make sure it is NOT simply a copy of another page on your site. Google is a very important source of traffic and takes a very dim view of cloning your pages.

Bogdan Fiedur.

Next lesson….

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