14 Marketers Share Little Known Marketing Ideas For A New Website
So you have just launched your website. You imagine getting millions of visitors to your site one day, but right now you only have your mom and her friends visiting it.
So how do you start getting the word out about your site and start receiving traffic?
Well here are 14 marketers who help websites day in and day out with their expert tips for new website owners:
David Bell, Diving Bell Creative
Our clients have this question a lot – how do we promote this awesome new site that we just put so much effort into launching? It really depends on what your goals are.
There are plenty of methods that have pretty much always worked – like sending out a newsletter to your existing customers along with a discount. You could then run some retargeting ads on Facebook to keep them engaged. Outside of the more traditional PR strategies, there are a lot of creative ways to market a new website.
For instance, if your company is an app, I’d recommend doing a Product Hunt launch or partner with AppSumo.
Another idea is hiring an influencer on social media to promote your new site launch – along with a special offer. I’d say, try not to over complicate it. Choose one idea at a time and work your way through them – with the analytics to see what is actually working.
Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth
I’m a huge proponent for SEO but that’ll take a bit to get traction. So if you’re looking to market a new website you should aim to create a single piece of content for your target audience that is better than anything else out there.
Once you have that piece created, shoot a video of yourself talking about that piece of content. Give a brief overview of what the piece covers and encourage viewers to check it out.
Once you have those two assets in place, it’s time for you to start distributing your video natively across the best social channels for your audience but don’t hesitate to run it everywhere. You never know what might gain traction. Again, distribute the video natively, don’t link to YouTube or anything like that, otherwise you’re unlikely to get as much organic reach.
Next, distribute it again. Iterate on your copy and look to see what resonates and attracts to most engagement with your audience. Once you know that, begin running the video as an ad across social channels and set up retargeting options for engaged viewers.
If your content piece fails to net any significant results, don’t get discouraged. Try again with a new content idea. If you fail and never try again, you’re never going to get anywhere.
You have to keep iterating, distributing, promoting, and evaluating. If you keep doing that, your brand new site will begin to grow much faster (and with a better audience) than simply doing SEO or running ads alone.
Amanda Thomas, Konstruct Digital
One of the challenges a new website typically faces is its ability to rank well in search. The exception to that being is if your domain and website had exceptional SEO prior to the new website and the website migration was handled flawlessly from an SEO perspective.
However, provided that your website has a unique brand name and that your site is in Google’s index, it’s likely your site ranks well for brand terms.
It’s thought that branded searches may indirectly influence non-branded searches in Google’s algorithm. The theory being that the more popular a brand is, the more authoritative it is, thus increasing authority signals.
One way to possibly leverage this (ahem: “hack”), is to increase your branded searches. So for example, in my email signature and email marketing, instead of directing users directly to my website (https://www.konstructdigital.com/), I would direct them to a search result page for my brand, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=konstruct+digital.
My goal with this tip was to stay away from more obvious marketing methods. As described, this idea is more theoretical/experimental, but you just might find it works for you!
Jeremy Moser, uSERP
My personal favorite approach to scaling a new website with marketing is to focus on content creation and promotion. And I’m not just talking about posting crappy content and sharing it on social media. Instead, you should be focused on creating ultimate guides in your space that match search intent, high volume and long-tail keywords, and drive engagement on site.
Once you’ve built a library of really good content, it’s time for promotion in the form of link building. Personally, I’ve scaled sites from 0 visitors to hundreds of thousands using good content and link building.
To get started, write for a few publications in your niche and direct people back to your website for more. This generates both a backlink and referral traffic, boosting domain authority and the ability to rank for your target keywords.
As you start to scale, outsource to an agency focused on premium links (like uSERP), who can help you scale and dominate your niche.
Tarek Elqoulaq, TarekElqoulaq.com
One of the first things you should do when starting a new website is develop a plan for which content you want to publish first. A common mistake people with new websites make is they base the success of much more aged and established domains in their space as a means for which content they should prioritize.
When starting a new site, it’s important to only pay attention to your true competitors. From an SEO perspective, the sites you should use for guidance on what content will work best for you are the ones that have these characteristics:
- Domain age: > 2 years
- Backlinks: > 100 LRDs
- # of content pages: > 200 pages
Mimic the top performing pages for sites that fall under this criteria, and you will see rankings with your content much faster than the average new website.
Kevin Dam, Aemorph
One of the best ways to market your new website is to offer your knowledge free of charge to existing groups on Meetup.com.
Depending on where you live, there are hundreds of groups available in most cities and you just need to filter out and find out which groups are most relevant to you or find your knowledge useful.
This helps you in multiple ways:
- You get to practice speaking in front of crowds
- People get to know you
- You’re adding value first to the meeting organiser who could refer you to someone else they know
- You can get a link back to your website from Meetup.com which is super powerful
- You start building a portfolio of online media
Daryl Driedger, Cowlick Studios
For any new website we launch, we recommend StoryChief and Quuu Promote to our customers as a way to get the word out quickly.
StoryChief is a lesser-known social media management tool, but where it excels is in long-form social content.
It can help you publish perfect optimized content as it has an SEO grader to benchmark your story before you post.
You can syndicate content to Medium, Linkedin, WordPress, Blogger, and even Google Business.
I find other management tools ignore these very important channels, and that’s why I love StoryChief!
Once you have a few great blog posts written on your new site, you are going to need to promote it online.
This is where Quuu Promote comes in… It is a network of publishers that all share posts to their social media profiles. Your content will be getting extra social links, shares and website traffic all from the platform.
I would say invest heavily in content marketing, the more you do it, the more the compound effect will kick in and you will see more traffic and sales.
While you are waiting for your SEO and content marketing to start moving, Ad Networks are a great way to get noticed fast with a minimum budget.
Zawad Iftikhar, SlyEcom
Biggest tip I can share is to get out of Google Sandbox as soon as possible.
Depending on your niche, you can buy ads at:
- Adwords
- Imgur
And don’t buy fake social signals.
If you want to hack your way through without spending money on ads, use:
Blog comments on mid-sized niche relevant blogs (be relevant to the topic, be the first comment, and you can drive good exposure to the website).
Build niche relevant memes with free offers like eBooks on Imgur. It has immense potential to drive a good amount of traffic.
Contribute in relevant subreddits on topics related to your website.
Leaving something relevant has a value in driving clicks to your website.
You can further use niche relevant forums to drive clicks to your website.
Your goal from running ads and growth hacking your way to drive traffic is to signal Google your website is getting real traffic and real traffic will get you out of the sandbox.
That means new content will index and rank faster.
Chris Sloane, Paving Marketers
One way you can drive traffic to a new website is to visit related blog or news sites and comment on the articles and posts. You want to be one of the first ones to do it – if dozens of people have already commented the chances people will see your website are pretty small.
You can take a similar approach to things like relevant Facebook Groups and subreddits on Reddit that relate to what you do. In all cases, you want to make sure you are contributing to the conversation and not simply promoting your website.
Your valuable contributions will do the promotion for you, and people who are interested will check out your website on their own. Just make sure you’re able to include a link either in your profile or message in a way that is natural and makes sense. This approach will also generally help your SEO efforts, as it will help build a natural and niche-relevant backlink profile.
Jason Schulz, 5Tales Digital Marketing
The best way to really get a new website flying out of the gates is to run a campaign from Facebook. The secret sauce here is two-fold.
Firstly, you want to ensure you get your Facebook pixel installed on your website.
Then, you want to run a traffic campaign from Facebook in order to drive new visitors to your website. As your campaign progresses you will be able to retarget those people who have visited your campaign from the traffic campaign but not yet converted.
Not only is this useful for getting new visitors to your website, but it has the benefit of helping your SEO efforts right from the start, possibly skipping the infamous “sandbox”.
Chris Porteous, My SEO Sucks
One interesting example of a little known marketing idea for a new website is the strategic use of personalized videos. What is a personalized video? Well, it is exactly what it sounds like — a video that is customized for a specific viewer, typically incorporating personalized elements (like the viewer’s name) into its content.
One reason it is so effective is because it makes the viewer go, “Wow, did they just make that video specifically for me?” Apart from the fact that it’s easier now to use personalization tech on video content, personalized videos are also quite effective in attracting traffic and boosting engagement for your website, especially your home page, or your product or service pages.
There are different ways you can do the personalization. You can get information from the viewer by gating your video with a simple form that collects their names. Or you can personalize videos for returning visitors, based on the email address or cookies settings that your AI detects.
Shaurya Jain, Attention Always Marketing
If you have started a new website, one of the best ways to market it is by appearing as a guest on podcasts. Blogging and SEO takes time. But with this tactic, all you need is 30 minutes of your time sharing your knowledge on someone’s podcast. Podcast hosts are continuously looking for interesting people to interview.
Just pitch different podcasts with unique propositions and get some interviews scheduled. Not only is the podcast audience more engaged than blog readers but they also have higher retention of who you are and what you do.
As an added benefit you get links to your site from the show notes which helps your site’s SEO.
If you can create a lead magnet specially for a podcast’s audience, you will get even more traffic and leads from your interviews. More work but definitely worth the effort.
Gabby Miele, From The Future
The best advice I’ve received about a new website consists of the content, the SEO, and all the good mechanics of a website. However, I’ve learned over time that it’s so much deeper than just publishing. Publishing your site is just the beginning, but what you do to continue garnering attention and positive press is what really matters.
After you get your content set up, it’s all about putting your name out there and finding those people in your industry that respect you for your thoughts and processes.
Define your voice as a leader and then continue to build your content. Turn to PR, link building, etc. to continue building your site’s authority for your top keywords. It’s the most rewarding way to build your own audience.
Carlos Obregon, Bloom Digital Marketing
When you are launching a new website, especially if it is your first one, the sheer number of options to promote it can be overwhelming. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, just take a look at where your competitors have incoming links from.
On Google, type in “competitor name” -competitorswebsite.com and take a look at the search results, you will get a bunch of websites where your competitor is mentioned, take note of those sites and make a list on a Google doc or spreadsheet.
Many of those sites will be easy to get listed into, think YellowPages, Yelp, and industry-specific directories.
As you are doing this work, look for Government websites in your country that list companies, in my case in Canada we have the Industry Canada directory, where Canadian companies can be listed for free. This is the URL: ic.gc.ca
Get listed there and boom now you have a Government link pointing at your site!
Conclusion
Marketing a new website isn’t easy. But, as you can see, there are plenty of ways to market a new website.
Follow the advice the pro’s have discussed above and you’ll soon start seeing results from your new website.
