WEBSITE PROMOTION

After your website is completed, you will need to drive traffic to all its glory. These days there are so many websites, you need to push yours, and bring visitors in. Below are some low-budget, effective ways to promote your website, and make your online investment worthwhile.

1. Use your printed material.

Generally you should mention your website in everything you print, i.e. business cards, forms, receipts, letter heads, etc. Also add your website to your email signature and any correspondence you send out. People will become aware of it, and will start to visit the site.

2. Use online directories

Simply listing your business in directories can help to bring more potential customers to your website, and will boost your search engine ranking. For a more targeted approach, find directories that are industry specific, e.g. directories of major associations, and groups in your field. You should continuously keep an eye out, for as many directories as you can get, take this as a long term project. The returns will be immense. Note that these directories also do their own promotion, and have applied some wizardry to attract search engines, which you will benefit from by listing.

A good general starting point is access Kenya's home.co.ke, but the list of options is unlimited.

3. Search Engine Optimisation.

You should optimise your sites content to make it legible to search engines, which will give it a favorable ranking in search engine results. This may better be done by the experts, as it will involve keyword research, and a series of tweaks, that are a topic for another day.

4. Blogging

A blog is a simple website that you can continuously update with relevant content to your field. Ideally you should have one built into your site for the complete brand experience, or you could use the free options available, like blogger.com, or wordpress.com, etc.

Regularly add articles to your blog, with a link to your site and in due time you will present the image of an expert in your field. If you are already on facebook, keep at it, just don’t mix your personal with your professional stuff.

5. Link exchange

You can approach a company that is related but not a competitor to you, and offer them an advert on your site, if they do the same for you. e.g. If you run a guest house, you can approach a tours and travel agency, or game parks/zoos to swap links.   

6. Advertising

Compared to any other advertising medium, services like Google ads and facebook ads are very cheap. If you consider that your target audience is one click away from your site, the effect on traffic is almost instant. Most of these ad services enable you to target your adverts. E.g. for Google you can show your ads only to people in a specific area. They even allow you to manage how much you spend, by putting caps on your number of views.

7. Launch

This may not be the cheapest method in this list, but it is very effective. You could invite friendly companies for lunch where you show your latest product (or your website). If done well, the return on investment is worth the effort. Your new product may pop up in conversations, or even appear in an article, or recommendation. This would work best if you launched to targeted agents of related friendly products.

It’s better to launch to many people at the same time, to save time, and sometimes make a bigger impact. After this, you should be able to maintain communication, and establish profitable relationships.


The fact is once your site is up; people have to know about it to visit it. And there are many more ways to promote your site, most costing only a little consistent effort.