How to Plan, Market and Monitor a Website that gets to Google Page 1…quickly!
The Grassroots Internet Strategy blog now appears on page one of Google’s search engine results page when you search for keywords like “internet strategy courses”, “revenue generation internet” and “internet strategy tips”. Serena, my partner in Grassroots Internet Strategy, and I did a lot of work in a short period of time to get the new website to page one in about 4-5 weeks.
Here’s a summary of the website planning, marketing and monitoring that got us to Google page one quickly.
Set up your website for search engine optimisation and content sharing, right from the start.
Create a Website Plan. Includes clear objectives for the website, work out who your target audience is, think about how you’re going to market your website and who is going to do the work. Include a plan to regularly create and share new articles in order to increase your web traffic and expand your network. Read more about why you need a website plan.
Make sure you have a Content Management System. A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to easily update and add new pages of web copy on a regular basis. In our case, the CMS is WordPress.
Work with people who know what they are doing. Luckily, we were our own website team, along with a crack WordPress web designer and developer. Choose your team of website professionals carefully. Ideally you need someone with skills in web design, web development, web copy writing and online marketing. One person might have more than one skill set but it’s highly unlikely one person can do everything you need well. Ask a lot of questions before you pay a deposit with a website company and know exactly what is, and isn’t, included in their quote.
Be ready for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) from the start, don’t wait until your website is live. We set the Grassroots blog up for on-page Search Engine Optimisation by adding a tool that allows us to add a custom Page Title, Meta Description and Keywords tag for each new page of web copy. We also created Tags for the blog that match our selected keywords. For example, it is the tag called “Website Plan” that shows up in Google search results, rather than a specific article related to creating a website plan. Use the marketing activities below to increase your web traffic quickly, which also helps your search engine ranking.
Add buttons that make it easy to share your content. We used a tool called Tweet Meme to add the “tweet” buttons to each new article and a another tool called “AddThis” that allows sharing via email, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon and other popular applications.
Read more about why we used a blog to make it easy to share content.
9 Ways to Market Your New Website.
1. Have a plan for regularly writing and sharing new content that gives value to your readers. We write two new articles per week which include keywords in the right places. For each new article, we select the focus keywords that are most relevant to the content of the article (you can also use Google’s free keyword tool to help with keyword selection) and use them in the Page Title, Meta Description, URL, Heading, Subheadings, Body Text and Image Names. Read more choosing keywords and putting them in all the right places.
2. Share new articles via Twitter and encourage others to do the same. We have added a tool to the blog that allows anyone to tweet an article. It automatically links to your Twitter account and creates a tweet based on the Page Title of the article. Tweet your own articles once they are published.
3. Share new articles via LinkedIn. We created a LinkedIn group for Grassroots Internet Strategy. Anyone is welcome to join. Once a week I create new discussions for all new articles that were published during the week. The list of new discussions is automatically emailed to members of the group the day after the discussions are posted. Members of the group can easily read and comment on the articles. If you’ve never shared an article on LinkedIn before, join our group and give it a try!
4. Build your database with a free download like an eBook or Whitepaper. In the early stages of our marketing we wrote a free ebook “Top 11 Website Mistakes and How to Avoid Them” and shared it via Twitter and LinkedIn groups. We created a sign up form with Mail Chimp in order to capture the email addresses of people downloading the ebook. The information you are providing needs to valuable enough to make people willing to give their email address.
5. Promotion via Email Marketing. We sent emails promoting the new blog to our networks and included it in our newsletters. Mail Chimp is an easy to use email program that is forever free if your list is less than 500 people. People who visit the blog can subscribe to receive updates via Feedburner, which automatically sends out new articles to your list of subscribers.
6. Drive traffic using Google AdWords Search Engine Marketing. We set up a low budget Google AdWords campaign to get on page one of Google, in the sponsored links section, as soon as the website was launched. This campaign generated traffic using targeted keywords like “internet strategy” and “website plan”. Want to try it? Find out about our $99 AdWords trial that includes $100 of free advertising with Google.
7. Create partnerships with organisations that have the same target audience. Figure out who the content of your website is valuable to and approach organisations that have a network of the people in your target audience. For example, our website is relevant to people setting up a new website, which most new business owners need to do so we are approaching organisations that help people start a business. We’ll ask them to promote our website and we’ll give their members a special offer.
8. Have an Affiliate Marketing program. We’ll be selling internet strategy related ecourses on the website and will soon launch a program that encourages other people to sell the courses on our behalf, in return for a 30% commission on each sale they make.
9. Build external links. External links from other websites to your are very important for SEO. Having valuable content is the best way to encourage other websites to link back to yours. You can also promote your website in an online press release, ask other website owners to add a link to your website and list your website in online web directories.
Ongoing Review and Monitoring of your Website
Have a Website Monitoring Tool installed. We set up Google Analytics prior to launching the website so that we can keep track of how many visitors we are getting, how they are finding our website and other useful information. This shows us how effective the above marketing activities are in terms of visitors numbers, how long the visitors stay and what pages they read. Read more about why you gotta have a website monitoring tool.
Regularly review your marketing plan. Once your website is launched, the fun has just begun! We constantly review our online marketing plan and make changes to add new things and improve the return on effort.
Use free tools to evaluate your web progress. The Hubspot Website Grader ranks your website out of 100. It shows how well you are using Page Titles and Meta Descriptions, how many inbound links you have, your web traffic relative to all the other websites in the world and other useful information. And it’s free. Don’t worry if your Website Grade starts low, as long as you’re working to improve it.
That was a long article. Thanks for staying with me!
Wow, this turned out to be a long article. It doesn’t include everything you need to know about planning and marketing a new website, but it summarises the things that work for us.
Feel free to bookmark this page so you can keep referring to it as you plan and market your website.
I’m going to be writing articles in the blog that provide more information on the topics listed above. You can subscribe to have Grassroots Internet Strategy emails delivered to your inbox twice a week. Or contact us if you’d like to chat about your website marketing.
