When was the last time someone shared your
product and services pages? Better yet, when was the last time that your
"get a quote" or "contact page" went viral? The truth is that website promotion doesn't
work that way. And if all you're focusing on is promoting
things like sales pages, you will likely fall behind. So how do you promote your website? You're about to learn 10 proven ways to do
it on a shoestring budget. Stay tuned. [music] What's up marketers, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search
traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. Now, there's a ton of material to cover today,
and the most important thing is that you get results. But there's something you need to understand
about these strategies before I teach them. Website or business promotion in the present
day doesn't work like it used to 10 or 20 years ago. Before, people would sift through newspapers,
send direct mail, and then they'd sit there and crossed their fingers and hope that someone would be in the market for whatever it is that they're selling. But the Internet has flipped that world upside
down and made one of the world's greatest resources accessible to everyone, for free. Think about it. People look for reviews before they buy. And I bet that there are even times when you're
in the store and you're looking for reviews before you buy something. Or you might even be comparing prices to see
if you can get a better deal elsewhere. So as marketers, we need to adapt and respond
to the need for quality and reliable information. So these website promotion tactics that you're
about to learn cater to how consumers respond today. And that's through content. So let's dive right into our website promotion
hacks. The first way to promote your website is one
of my favorites, and that's to take a data-driven approach to forum commenting. Here's the thing, blindly answering every
question in your niche on a forum like Quora will likely leave you with zero results and
a ton of wasted time. But there are a couple things you can do to
know with confidence whether the question has potential to drive traffic back to your
website. So the step one is to type in "Quora.com" into Ahrefs
Site Explorer. And you can see that the domain gets 151 million
search visitors per month. Now let's go to the top pages report, so we
can see the pages that get the most organic search traffic. Now, let's say that I have a website on college
education, I'll type in the keyword, "college," into the include search box. Now, you can see the estimated search traffic
that each page gets, so it's just a matter of picking and choosing the topics that are
relevant to the content on your website. So, let's click through to this one that looks
like it's about the length of a college semester. And once you land on this page, you'll want to
look at two things. First is the total number of views that the
question has had, which you can see in the sidebar if you're logged into your Quora account. Next, look for a recent answer to calculate
the approximate monthly traffic. This one was answered around 7 months ago
and has accumulated around 6,600 views. Now, do the math. 6,600 divided by 7 months, is approximately
942 views per month. From here, you could provide a better answer
than the existing ones and include relevant links back to your pages. From my experience, I've seen 30-40% click
through rates to links that support your answer. The next promotion strategy is to dip into
untapped paid media sources, so that automatically excludes Facebook ads and Google Adwords. Now, don't get me wrong, both of these ad platforms
are amazing and can produce insane ROI for your business. But in general, ad networks work as auctions. So as more people flock to these networks,
the prices skyrocket. But there are less popular places to advertise
for cheap. The one ad platform that I've been raving
about over the past two years is Pinterest ads. Check out these results from one of my paid
campaigns. Just under $1,500 spent, translated into almost
15,000 clicks and 140,000 engagements, which would be repins, likes, and comments. That's $0.10 per click, $1.23 per thousand
impressions, and a penny per engagement. Now, you don't need to spend $1,500 per month,
instead, you can spend $10 dollars, $20 dollars, $50, or $100 and see where that takes you. Pinterest is well known for the quality of
traffic they send to websites. And it's definitely one that I encourage you
to explore if your target audience is using it. Other untapped ad networks that you may not
have used are Outbrain, Taboola and Yahoo Gemini. Again, I've found informational content to
work significantly better than landing pages. So experiment and take advantage of these
untapped networks. The next promotion technique is to guest blog. Now, I know that guest blogging can be hit
or miss since not everyone has a "Write for us" page asking people for guest posts. So I want to share two surefire ways to find
websites that you can approach, confidently knowing that they accept guest posts. First is to Google a query like, "guest post
by", and then intitle:your topic. And you'll find some very relevant websites
that are clearly accepting guest posts. Now, if you're an Ahrefs user, then you can
use our SEO toolbar by enabling the Chrome or Firefox extension. And right away, you'll be able to see the
SEO metrics like Domain Rating and Search Traffic, so you can see how much Google traffic
the websites get on a domain level. That way, you'll know whether writing for
these sites are worth your time, or if it's an opportunity you should skip. So now you can pitch the website owners, knowing
that they accept guest posts, even though they may not have a "Write for us" page. Another way you can do this is using Ahrefs
Content Explorer. You can use similar search operators here. So let's search for title:pregnancy and then as a phrase match "guest post by." Next, I'll click on the "One article per domain"
filter since we don't need to contact the same website more than once. And now we have 215 sites we can guest post
for, plus all of the SEO metrics to help narrow down the sites we want to write for. The next promotion strategy is to get free
press from journalists using HARO. HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. Their platform allows journalists to find
sources, and for sources to find journalists. After you sign up for an account, you'll get
email notifications that look like this. You just need to skim through the results,
and if something catches your eye, then you can read the full description. So this person wants some tips on maintaining
a balance between your personal and business lives. And she's also made it a requirement that
you should be a small business owner or employee. If you fit the criteria, then click on the
email link, write a short and sweet pitch that provides unique insights and fulfills
all requirements that they're looking for. And if they like your answer, you should get
an email like this that will almost always include a high-quality link back to your site. Let's stay on the topic of PR with the next
promotion strategy, and that's to become a source for journalists on any publication
that you want. HARO is awesome to get emails directly from
journalists in your inbox, but the requests that come through can be hit or miss. Using Google Alerts, you can expand your search
to only specific topics from publications that you want to be featured in. Let's say that you're an expert on hurricanes
and want to be a source for journalists on websites like the New York Times or the Huffington
post. So you can create an alert like this. Just type within parentheses (site:nytimes.com
or site:huffingtonpost.com) or whatever website you want to monitor, and then I'll type intitle:hurricane. What this query does is it tells Google to
send you an alert anytime the New York Times or the Huffington Post writes an article where
the title has the word "hurricane" in it. Now, when you get an alert that matches your
criteria, you can skim through the article and look for a place where you can add more
value. From there, you would contact the author,
introduce yourself with your qualifications, and offer your expertise for that article
or for any future articles that they might write on that topic. The next website promotion technique is to
use social groups and I'm not just talking about Facebook. Facebook groups are great and there's a group
for virtually any topic under the sun. But group owners and moderators are very well
aware that people will often join their group just to promote their website, product or
service. But you want to know another group that actually
encourages posting links to your blog? Pinterest. Pinterest group boards are essentially collaborations
where a group of people share links, images, and videos on a specific topic. You can find group boards by going to pingroupie.com
and searching for your topic here. So I'll type in "animals." And now you can see a bunch of group boards
that would be worth reaching out to along with the number of followers and how often
content gets repinned. Let's click on this one on "wildlife". And you can see that the description shows
some rules for the board. Other times, the owner of the board will include
their contact details, so contact them, ask to join their board, and boom, you now have
access to reach the board's followers with your content. In fact, Group Boards have been a huge part
of the reason why one of my accounts gets over a million viewers and 60,000 engagements
every single month. The next tip is to create a free resource
or tool and promote the heck out of it. Knowledge is power. And if you can make attaining knowledge easier,
then all the power to you. So here are a few ideas of what you can create. First is a video course on a topic. And it doesn't have to be anything fancy,
but it should provide value. So for example, if I wanted to show people how
to create videos for YouTube, then I might make 3 videos. One that talks about equipment and setup,
another on choosing topics, and one on video marketing or YouTube SEO. Another resource you can create are templates. At Ahrefs, we love creating Google sheets
and sometimes we include them in our blog posts, which enhances our articles because it helps
people take action using the exact same documents that we use. And the last one is my favorite, and that's
to create a free tool. People love free and people love tools. Take this one as an example. You can paste in a line separated list, and
it converts it into a comma separated list. And according to Ahrefs Site Explorer, this
page gets around 2,400 monthly search visitors from Google every single month. But I get it. You may not have the skillset to create these tools. Well you can actually create a simple calculator using Upwork or even Fiverr starting at just $20! Here's a really cool way to find tool ideas
worth building. I'll go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer tool
and type in "college," assuming that's a keyword related to my industry. Next, I'll go to the phrase match report. Finally, I'll type in the word "calculator"
in the include box. And right away, we have a list of potential
tools we can create. Looking at the top 10 Google search results,
for the first keyword, "college GPA calculator", you'll see that the top ranking page generates
over 750,000 search visitors per month! The next tip is to take snippets of your articles
to increase social sharing. If you look at one of our blog posts, you'll
see that it's a massive list of 75 SEO tips. In fact, this post is over 9,700 words, so
the percentage of people who read the entire article will be slim to none. So you can splice each tip into a short snippet
and you now have 75 different things to share on your social media networks. In fact, that's something we've done
on Twitter, which has helped us generate over 9,300 social shares from just Twitter, Facebook,
and Pinterest. Turn each tip into an image, and you now have
75 posts you can share on Instagram and Pinterest. The next tip is to partner up with complimentary
businesses and do a joint webinar. Here's how they work. Someone from company A contacts someone in
a complimentary, non-competing business, and asks, "Hey want to do a webinar together?" The person from Company B says, "Sure." Then each company promotes the webinar to
their respective email lists, customer lists, or whatever promotion methods they choose. Then when they present the webinar, they'll
both teach on the set topic, incorporate their products and expertise, and usually pitch
their product at the end. So essentially, you're helping each other
promote your websites, grow your businesses, and generate more revenue. And this is a technique that we've been using. We've recently joined forces with Buffer to deliver
a free webinar on how to get more traffic to your website. Now, before you go out and start pitching
random companies, I highly recommend starting with people you know and have an existing
relationship with. So go through your inbox, and try to reconnect
before asking them for a solid. The next tip is to repurpose your content. On a good week, it takes around 20 hours to
create a piece of content for Ahrefs blog or YouTube channel. But rather than calling it a week, we take our
content and repurpose them into different media types. The thing is that people have different learning
styles. Some want to watch a video and others prefer
to read a blog post. So let's take the SEO tips post again. Almost 10,000 words of pure gold. So we turned it into a 17 minute video with
a little bit of overlap, but some different tips that aren't included in the blog post. Our video on local SEO takes you through a
step-by-step process where you can follow a story of ranking my local coffee shop, High-Speed
Coffee, whereas the blog post gets into the nitty gritty details of each step. Other ways you can repurpose your content
is to turn a blog post into a Slideshare presentation, infographic, video or if you didn't start
with a blog post, reverse it into one. These are some tactics that are working for
us right now at Ahrefs and some that we're still testing. Now make sure to like, share, and subscribe
so that you can get updates on SEO and marketing strategies that are working today. Also, leave a comment and let me know which
website promotion tip was your favorite. Or if you have another one that I missed,
I'd love to hear from you and test it out for myself. So keep grinding away, go and promote your
website, and I'll see you in the next video.
