Website promotion is the continuing process to promote a website to bring more visitors to the website. Many techniques such as web content development, search engine optimization (also known as SEO), and search engine submission, are used increase the traffic to a site. There are a wide variety of different ways you can promote your site, some are free of charge, and some require a fee to be paid

Types of Promotion

Promotion is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. An organization or set of organizations (go-betweens) involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user.

Above the line promotion is promotion in the media, through channels such as the TV, newspapers, the Internet and Mobile Phones. Advertisers will often pay an advertising agency in order to place the ad which will then be shown and distributed through the above mediums. The commercials and advertisements we see everyday on billboards and televisions, and that we hear on radio stations are forms of above the line promotion, designed to draw in customers and traffic through some of the most popular and effective techniques, and distributing them at allotted times or places. More popular times and places will cost more than those that are less popular.

Below the line promotion is all other types of promotion; a lot of this is intended to be subtle enough for the consumer to be unaware that promotion is even taking place. This is done through sponsorship, product placement, endorsements, sales promotion, merchandising, direct mail, personal selling, public relations and trade shows. This type of promotion is not quite as effective as above the line, but still draws in a significant amount of traffic due to its persuasive yet subtle marketing techniques.

The specification of these four variables creates a promotional mix or promotional plan. A promotional mix specifies how much attention to pay to each of the four subcategories, and how much money to budget for each. A promotional plan can have a wide range of objectives, including: sales increases, new product acceptance, creation of brand equity, positioning, competitive retaliations, or creation of a corporate image.

What is an advertising campaign?

An advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages that share a single idea and theme which make up an integrated marketing communication (IMC). Advertising campaigns appear in different media across a specific time frame. The critical part of making an advertising campaign is determining a champion theme as it sets the tone for the individual advertisements and other forms of marketing communications that will be used. The campaign theme is the central message that will be communicated in the promotional activities. The campaign themes are usually developed with the intention of being used for a substantial period but many of them are short lived due to factors such as being ineffective or market conditions and/or competition in the marketplace and marketing mix.

Site promotion through SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s one of the best tools that you can utilize in terms of free website promotion. Search Engine Optimization is the process of making website pages attractive to search engines, improving your ranking making your site appear more frequently during searches, and become more likely to be visited by internet browsers.  One of the best things about SEO has to be that it’s not hard to learn and apply the basics to your own website. Through working effectively on SEO, you can improve the page rankings of your web pages and drive more traffic to your site, SEO can be carried out by yourself, mostly free of charge, or done for you by a Search Engine Optimization company, often for a substantial fee.

Site promotion through reciprocal link work

When other people put a link to your site on their site, you get free website promotion. You also get the opportunity to enjoy better search engine rankings for your page. Almost all search engines will use inbound links as an important part of the formula that determines a page’s rank. Often, however, this kind of link work is not a numbers game, so littering sites with your link often won’t quite do the job, it is in fact the quality of the link that really matters when it comes to reciprocal linking. In order to succeed, it’s a good idea to focus your reciprocal linking efforts on relevant quality links. The standard procedure is to search for and identify relevant sites that you would like to have link to yours and then send each webmaster an email requesting a link on their site, offering a link on your site in return.

Article writing and Site Promotion

This strategy is often a very popular one, as you are effectively allowing someone else to promote your site for you. It takes one well written article to be published on a long-lived, well known website, and it can sit there giving you free website promotion for a very long time with no further effort required on your part. However, the main issue with this is often people take advantage of the system, and fail. The way to succeed is to write well on a topic that people will want to read about, and a topic that is relevant to your website, so that you can link from it with ease. Some websites will often delete articles that are poorly written, too short, contain too many links, or contain links irrelevant to the article in question, as it can sometimes be seen as misleading to the reader. Article Alley is a very popular and effective article submission site, but before submitting your articles make sure that you read through our guidelines to ensure your article is suitable for our website, this is always worth doing when submitting to websites.

Other forms of Site Promotion

There are a wide variety of different website promotion techniques available on the internet, most can be gained through a small fee. There are many companies who offer to completely redesign your website and make it completely search engine friendly, however, you should always be wary and investigate the company thoroughly before investing any hard earning money on an SEO campaign.