Effective Website Marketing Strategies

Effective website marketing strategies are essential to your long term success on the Web, yet most website owners don't have a real plan. Choosing the right strategy, and more importantly, working the right plan can mean the difference between your site being popular, and unheard of.

Below is a breakdown of what makes up effective strategies.

These techniques can be adapted to bring free traffic to any type of site, be it an online store, a blog, a content site, a membership site, and so on. Know the concepts, and you'll be able to choose the right plan for you. We'll get into exactly what these concepts are, but first a little background.

You can always pay for traffic, that much is sure. Making paid traffic pay off, however, is another matter. There are a number of website marketing strategies that involve paid methods. Some examples would include paid links, paid press releases, and pay per click marketing.

These methods can be effective if done right, but here I'd like to focus on what most of the site owners I talk to want most... free website traffic and how to get it.

Diversification Equals More Free Traffic

Free website traffic may come from various sources, and I always recommend diversifying for maximum stability. The "best" traffic, of course is typically targeted search engine traffic.

Of all the search engines, Google, by far, provides the most traffic for the majority of sites. It is therefore obviously wise to please Google. The problem is, though, that sometimes Google isn't always easily pleased, and tends to change its mind from time to time.

But, there's an interesting irony here, and this brings me to one of my guiding principles for marketing your site, and a maxim, of sorts. It has two parts...

• The more diverse the traffic sources, the more you reduce your dependence upon Google.

• The more you reduce your dependence upon Google, the more traffic Google will likely send you.

Like so may things about the Web, this seems counterintuitive at first glance. If you look more closely, however, it makes sense.

Increase the number of links pointing to your site, and Google will trust your site more. Since Google is the most link sensitive engine, you can create a linking structure that influences what Google thinks of your website, and therefore how much traffic you get.

Key Concepts of Website Marketing Strategies

In a nutshell then, the best website marketing strategies are going to improve the diversity of your links and/or the number of keywords your site is found for. You might be thinking, OK,that makes sense now, but what do I do to make that happen?

When promoting your site, there are really only two things you need to do (it's that simple). First, create content on your own site. Second, create links to your site. This may involve creating content on someone else's site, or having others do that for you.

As a strategy, you could simply create content on your site until enough people take notice. The problem with this "brute force content creation" method is that for most websites in most niches, it takes way too long to get noticed. To speed things up, you need to do more.

As an alternative, instead of creating content you could go out and create tons of links. While link building is important for increasing website traffic, link building at the expense of building your own site is often a mistake.

If you don't have enough content on your site to keep the attention of your audience, all the link building in the world isn't going to do you much good.

Here's a website marketing strategy that takes a balanced approach and incorporates both onsite content and diversified link building techniques. The more detailed version of that is published as a step-by-step website marketing plan.

When evaluating which website marketing strategies to use, you obviously have to take into account your long term and short term objectives. If you're in doubt, there are a number of guiding principles you can use that will almost always assure a win for you.

Below are 5 key concepts of effective website marketing strategies.

• Diversification

  We've covered diversification above, so I'll just mention here that you should work toward a more diversified linking program, as well as getting your site found for a more diverse set of keywords.

• Leverage

  Leverage involves giving something more power or reach than it would have otherwise. For example, Squidoo is a popular website. If you create a Squidoo lens, you're creating a page on a very powerful site. This gives your page much more power than it would have if you simply made a single page website.

• Scalability

  Scalability is often referred to as "ramping up." When implementing website marketing strategies, you'll find that some techniques are more scalable than others. When you only have one site, or you don't get much traffic, some techniques make sense. As your site(s) grow, however, you may find that you need to change how you do things.

  For example, let's say you answer questions via email. That's fine, but what happens when you get 50 questions a day? Personal responses don't scale well. You may need to switch to answering questions on your site, which is not only a time saver, it has other benefits as well.

• Money proximity

  Money proximity is the term I use to mean that a technique or method produces money more directly. For example, if you write an article and post it on someone else's site with a link back to yours, it may bring traffic and improve your search engine ranking. It does not, however, earn income for you directly. A page on your site, on the other hand, can earn money directly, so it has more money proximity.

• Automation

  Using automation can help with creating leverage, diversification efforts, and scalability. Submitting to directories, for example, is a tedious process. You can leverage the power of automation to help you submit to more directories in less time.

When evaluating how to market your website, look at how these factors play out. If you can't have money proximity, then get leverage. If you can't have leverage, make sure you've got diversification. If you can't automate, get money proximity, and so on.

Website marketing strategies all start with the proper planning of course. Part of that planning involves onsite content creation (your best way to grow your business and add PageRank), followed by link building.

Each strategy may need to be adjusted, depending upon the business model(s) you have in place. The principles that make a strategy good are the same, though, no matter what. So, for maximum effectiveness, make sure that the strategies you choose use one or more of the techniques above.

This website marketing plan works for any kind of site I know of. Try it out and let me know how it works for you.

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