“Why do I need to promote my WordPress website?” Hm, good question!
Take a look at these figures I’m about to show you and you will find the answer yourself. According to a research carried out by mentafloss, there were only 3000 websites on the Internet two decades ago, while that number rose to roughly 1 billion when recorded in October 2015. As if its growth was not fast enough, there came the invention of this amazing content management system called WordPress, which started a whole new era of prosperity for online websites.
As you’re reading this article, there are more than 75 million websites out there powered by WordPress, and the number is skyrocketing! Now, can you see why you have to promote your WordPress website yet? Well, it is mostly because if you don’t, nobody will find out about your website in this dense forest of WordPress websites of the same kind!
To put it another way, let’s say your products have the best quality anyone can ever ask for, but how do they know if you are not going to tell them? The same goes with launching a WordPress website. Your website may offer the best kind of information, but without the right advertising, people won’t even know about its existence, let alone visit it. Knowing that promoting your WordPress website could be a challenge and sometimes costly, I decided to write a collection of 10 methods to promote your WordPress websites.
Having been tested thoroughly and with success, these 10 free ways of promoting a WordPress website will please you:
- Focus on SEO
- Make Full Use of Backlinks
- Pay Attention to Content
- Do Signature Branding
- Take Advantage of Facebook and Google Plus
- Start an Email List
- Utilize High-Quality Images
- Do Case Studies of Influential Figures
- Organize Contests
- Write Fantastic Headlines
Enough chit-chat! Now, let’s get to work, shall we?
Focus on SEO
Understanding the benefits of traditional SEO to WordPress will take your website to a whole new level. Therefore, while planning on your website content, pay attention to the SEO tools that will help. The idea here is to find the best keywords for your niche. For this spectacular purpose, I highly recommend Google Keyword Tool Planner.
When using this, remember to focus on the keywords that have low competition and high search frequency, so that your articles will get noticed more easily when published. What is more, concentrate on long-tail keywords, as those are what will help your website to be ranked high and attract a good deal of traffic.
After you have done with choosing a keyword, do not forget to insert it in your post title, headings, content, meta description as well as title tag and alt tag of your pictures (if any). Another important metrics, which influences website ranking, is website loading speed: make sure you monitor not only the speed of your website, but also its stability. In case you are running a website on a dedicated server, you may need to hire a dedicated Azure developer or devops to keep an eye on its uptime.
And ah, my final piece of advice in this matter: having popular keywords in your content is a good thing, but do not overuse them! You are writing for humans to read, not for robots.
Make Full Use of Backlinks
Having good content is important to your WordPress website, but it is also as important to have good backlinks. Regarding this, there are two ways to get them: Learning from competitors, or build them yourself.
What do I mean by “learning from competitors”? Well, I obviously mean that you should analyze your best competitors’ backlinks to find new backlinks chances. With the help of Monitor Backlinks, you can sort them by metrics and see what is good for your website. If you’re still confused, you may find it convincing to analyze those backlinks because they will show you:
- Bloggers who are likely to link and share your content
- Websites where your competitors contribute (so you can become one too)
- The backlinks that enable them to rank high with Google
In case you want to get success with your own efforts, you could try building your own high-quality backlinks. This generates natural traffic and improves your SEO. However, don’t spend your time on doubtful chances, as bad backlinks may cost you more than you expect, Google penalties for example. Now, how can you build your own backlinks? Well, you could try writing guest articles, using link roundups, outreaching to bloggers and journalists of your niche, etc. Once you have good backlinks, you should keep track of them by using Monitor Backlinks also.
Pay Attention to Content
You may not know this yet, but publishing more content actually does good to your traffic. As Hubspot showed in their research, businesses that publish more than 16 blog posts every month receive 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads than those publishing between 0 – 5 blog posts. Thus, if you are in the group of businesses publishing fewer than 10 posts a month, you should increase to 3 or 4 posts every week, and check the traffic you get.
Moreover, longer high-quality content is also a plus. Research has taught us that longer content is more favored by Google as well as other search engines. They also get more shares and links. Meanwhile, it is a fact that a post that offers good information is always more appealing to readers.
Therefore, you should make an attempt to write more longer posts and in an in-depth fashion, offering comprehensive and useful information, in order to raise your website’s level in the eyes of your readers.
Do Signature Branding
Your branding decides what customers recognize you as. Hence, spending some time on making your brand easy to recognize and appealing enough to get attention is a must. You could do it by creating a signature for your email account, text messages and even the forums that have your website URL. By this way will you enable your brand to be recognized by people and you can also get people to click on the URL linking to your website.
However, please note that if you decide to insert your URL in text messaging and other mobile advertising options, do have a mobile friendly website, or else it will backfire on you and people will not likely to visit again.
Take Advantage of Facebook and Google Plus
The advice here is: do not limit yourself within the group of followers you have via your social channels. You know for a fact that there are groups of people doing the same business with you on Facebook and Google Plus, where you can share your content and discuss with them. For example, you can start seeding your best WordPress blog posts in these Facebook groups. However, don’t do it like a robot because it might seem annoying. Instead, you can raise your content as a topic and have people interacting around it.
Many people have succeeded in attracting hundreds of people there to their websites, and you can be the next one! All it requires is time, carefulness and patience.
Start an Email List
Email is always in the top 3 when it comes to the best sources of traffic to a WordPress website. Why? Easy! It is because while everything else could fluctuate, going up and down unstable, the email list will only get longer, allowing you to have the access to a database of people and email them whenever you want to. Having a list of subscribers will help you decrease the bounce rate and increase the returning rate of your beloved website. What is more, there is a sense of intimacy when you communicate with them personally via emails, telling them about your latest posts and events or even ask for comments and feedbacks on products.
Thus, if you haven’t collected visitors’ email addresses, do it now! Don’t know how to start? Installing Sumo Me will give you a hand.
Utilize High Quality Images
Using high-quality images for your WordPress blog posts will not only make your website look good and stand out from the crowd, but also help you get backlinks. Imagine this, you have a beautiful and unique image on your website, it is certain that people might want to use it. When they are approved to do that, they will link to your website as an act of crediting. What does that mean? Yes, it means that your website’s fame has now been spread out.
Moreover, having good images on your website will also increase your chances of being featured on social media, and by which I mean on giant platforms like Pinterest. What could you expect more?
Do Case Studies of Influential Figures
What is the good thing with this? Your website’s exposure.
How to do this? First, identify the ones that have influence over your niche. This can be anyone, ranging from a blogger, a designer, a developer to a popular website’s owner. As long as they have a broad network and a large group of followers, they can be the one. Then, do a case study or an interview with them. Make it a good one so that you can politely ask them to share it. And, bam! Look at how drastically the traffic to your website increases, which also means you have successfully extended your website’s exposure.
For example, if you did a case study of an influential blogger who is loved and admired so much by the WordPress community and had him share it when it goes live, it would be normal for your post to get thousands of views and hundreds of shares. Try, it will be worth the effort.
Organize Contests
Hosting a contest on your WordPress website is a quick way of making it popular within the community. For example, you can host a blogging contest about any hot subject at the time (or a simple Best Entry contest), and make it a condition for every participant to share your article about it on their blogs or social media channels.
It will draw the attention of others who also want to take part in the competition, and eventually replicate your website’s popularity. In order to promote your website, you could also hold a traffic contest, where the one who send the most traffic to your website in a month will be awarded a prize. Some famous WordPress plugins in creating and running your future contests include ContestHopper and myCRED.
If possible, you may try to get some sponsors for your contest as well. These sponsors are likely to share the information about the contest, and the one who gets the most advantages is clearly your website.
Write Fantastic Headlines
Have you heard that a simple good headline can dramatically boost the traffic to your website? As Copyblogger says, 8 out of 10 people on average read your headline, while only 2 of them read your content. Thus, it is of vital importance to make efforts with your headlines. However, while it is essential to write a headline with SEO in mind for the sake of search engines, it is also worthy to remember that your headlines should be attractive to humans too. A good headline for your blog post will enhance your CTR on search engines and on social media as well.
Wrapping Up
Although there are so many more measures to carry out in the mission of promoting your WordPress websites, the 10 ways above are what I believe to be the most effective after serious consideration and trials. Spend some time to try those, and I bet you will not be disappointed!