How to Promote Your Website

Traffic is the elusive energy source for your music promotion success. Attracting it, in large numbers, to your website, is critical. It can be done for free (time = money) or with some supporting investment. However you decide to proceed (on this page!), there is one rule you should follow:

The only traffic that counts is Engaged Traffic

A million spambots from Ukraine does zero for your career. Bring real visitors, from your part of the world, who are lookikng for what you offer, or at least are open to it. Bringing visitors to your website is done in three ways. Here are the instructions to proceed:

Draw in Organic Traffic

Make your website Search Engine Friendly, by defining great niche keywords and using them properly on your site. Keywords are the phrases people search for. Phrases that have tons of competition are best avoided, while phrases that no one searches for are useless. Use a free tool such as SEO Book. They have a fantastic set of freebies for this.
Optimize your site for your chosen keywords. WEBCEO is a great tool for this. There's a 30 day trial to get started, and an online version.
Stimulate inward-bound links. They help search engine rankings, when coming from high quality pages with a Google PageRank of 4 or above. More importantly, they bring in traffic directly IF they are on real sites with real people. Thus, submit your site to real directories now: Yahoo, DMOZ, HighRanking Directory and Sites Web Directory.
Write an article and submit it to an article site: EzineArticles and GoArticles, for starters.

Encourage Social Traffic

Get a strong presence on the social media pages: Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, Myspace.
Get a tool to manage all your social postings: Get Hoot Suite and/or Simply Cast.
Posts should NOT sound like ad copy. Best if they are visual, meaning poat a picture and comment on it rather than just write stuff. They should contain a link to your site and a reason to click it (ie. come to the site for an awesome video of the rehearsal). Create four types of posts:

Marketing and sales updates. Example: Just got the CD on sale folks, get it at www.____.com
Personal updates. Example: Here's a photo from the rehearsal we had yesterday for the Sunday show.
Interaction magnets. Examples: Hey guys, which one of these pictures do you prefer for our poster? And requests for the next show? Favorite song by Fillin Theblank?
Normal day-to-day chatting about nothing related to your music. This just keeps you real and connected, and deepens your relationship with fans.

Schedule the posts with Hoot Suite and/or Simply Cast and automate it, so you don't burn your time there, but are still very present and persistent.

Create Paid Traffic

Use Facebook Ads carefully and when necessary. Even more so with Google Adsense. Check out the page on social media marketing for more info.
Send out a professional Press Release. Use eRelease to blast it all over the media spectrum. This will get you lots of real traffic as well as some good critical reviews on blogs, newspapers and radio. Check out the page on how to write a press release for more info.

There is more, but these activities will take enough time and give you a serious start in promoting your website.

When you're satisfied, click here for the next Music Promotion Action!

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