Whether you’re in the early stages of your business or looking to strengthen your position in your industry, you might think spending a fortune on online advertisements is the only practical approach to drive traffic to your site.

But with the right mix of ad spending, digital marketing tools, and well-curated strategies, you can promote your website without solely relying on high-cost methods. Read on to discover how to craft a website promotion strategy that attracts visitors and convinces them to convert.

How to promote your website online: 10 methods

Here are 10 website promotion strategies to increase brand awareness and conversion rates.

1. Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves optimizing your website’s content and technical structure to improve its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). When promoting your site, you should conduct both on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is everything on your website, including text, images, videos, meta descriptions, and the logical layout in which they appear. Best practices for on-page SEO include:

• Focusing on high-quality, relevant content that addresses your target audience’s needs.
• Ensuring technical elements, like website structure, metadata, and multimedia, allow search engines to crawl your site.
• Using responsive layouts and navigation elements to improve multi-device compatibility and user experiences.

Off-page SEO refers to behind-the-scenes activity, like who’s linking to your site, how authoritative it is, and the engagement it gets from readers. Here are a couple of off-page SEO improvement tips:

• Increase inbound links (links from external websites to yours) to boost your site’s domain authority and search rankings.
• Share links on social media platforms to direct organic search traffic to your site and improve its online presence.

For more complicated SEO techniques, like editing schema markups, updating sitemaps, and optimizing 301 redirects, you can use automated SEO tools without relying on developers or engineers.

2. Guest blogging

Guest blogging promotes your website by leveraging existing audiences of established platforms in your industry. You create and publish articles on external blogs, and this allows you to share your expertise while introducing your brand to a broader audience.

For example, a head of marketing at an email marketing platform company might write a guest post for a prominent digital marketing blog about the latest email personalization trends.

Successful guest blogging hinges on the quality of articles you contribute and the relationships you build with other companies. Each guest post should include links to your site, called backlinks — these drive traffic to your site while providing value to the publishing blog’s readers.

3. Content marketing

Content marketing goes beyond traditional blogging to embrace video production, podcasts, infographics, newsletters, and other content formats. To stand out, you must ensure content is attractive, relevant, and compelling enough to encourage people to click your calls to action (CTAs).

Conduct thorough keyword research to understand your audience’s pain points. You can use popular SEO tools to find queries related to your field or locality, and answering these questions in your content ensures the content is informative, persuasive, or entertaining.

For example, you might create a newsletter series explaining complex design concepts after identifying the most common questions in your area. That way, you establish your brand as a thought leader by consistently providing this valuable content.

4. Social media

Social media is one of the best free methods for promoting your website to a broad or targeted audience. Each platform has unique advantages and caters to different business needs, demographics, and psychographics.

Here’s a quick summary of factors to consider for the most popular ones:

• Facebook. With its vast user base, Facebook is ideal for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. It has a dedicated marketing space with ad targeting options, making it suitable for demographic and behavior-based campaigns.
• X (formerly Twitter). X thrives on real-time engagement and virality, making it ideal for B2C companies that want to create content around trending topics. While X is primarily text-based, you can create multimedia content and link to it on X.
• Instagram. Known for its visuals and short-form videos, Instagram appeals to a younger demographic, but any marketing team can use it for B2B purposes and show off a brand’s creative side.
• TikTok. TikTok is a short-form video platform popular with Gen Z and millennial audiences. You can create video content to show off your products and services — or work with TikTok influencers to build brand awareness and drive traffic to your site.
• Reddit. Before promoting your website on Reddit, its audience will expect you to join conversations on subreddits (specific interest forums). Actively participating in these niche communities and adding value to conversations builds your credibility.
• LinkedIn. The go-to platform for professionals and B2B marketing, LinkedIn allows you to establish thought leadership through articles, lengthy posts, and company updates. It’s ideal for networking and reaching decision-makers within various sectors.

When creating content, remember that each platform requires its own engagement and marketing strategies. Polls and live videos perform better on Instagram and TikTok, while text-based content suits Reddit and X.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing lets you directly communicate with your audience before and after your website launch. Here are a few advantages of this tactic:

• You can personalize emails and make them relevant to each recipient.
• You can measure email campaign performance through metrics like open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates.
• Email marketing is an accessible and cost-effective promotion strategy that offers a potentially high return on investment (ROI).

With these in mind, here are several email marketing strategies to consider when promoting your website:

• Prelaunch engagement. Build a buzz for your website launch event by connecting with potential visitors early. For example, share an email sign-up link across your social media platforms so people can join your email list without visiting the site.
• Launch promotions. Apart from link-sharing, you can implement creative email campaigns like a countdown to launch, sneak peeks, and exclusive prelaunch offers. This attracts interest and encourages people to engage with your site once it’s live.
• Follow up. Keep engaging with subscribers after the launch by sharing updates, blog posts, and special offers. You can also add email sign-ups into your site design to steadily grow leads while keeping your audience informed and involved.

6. Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a marketing tool for improving local visibility and attracting traffic to your website. This free and user-friendly service helps your business appear in relevant local searches, which is crucial if you rely on local footfall or want to increase awareness in your region.

With a Google Business Profile, you can attach your website to other information about your business, like opening hours, contact details, and location. This allows potential customers to find your company quickly and engage with your offering.

7. Quora

Quora is a popular question-and-answer (Q&A) site that often ranks highly in search results for common queries. Despite its reputation for occasionally being overrun with promotional content, you can use Quora to improve visibility and drive targeted traffic to your site by answering questions on Quora and linking back to your site.

Quora’s strong SEO presence means well-crafted answers can appear on Google’s first page, especially for long-tail keyword searches. This exposure introduces your brand to a broad audience actively looking for information. And by answering questions in your field, you show expertise and offer value to readers, helping you become a credible source.

You can also strategically link back to your website in your Quora answers. For example, you might reference a detailed blog post on your site that goes into greater depth about a question. That way, readers receive more value while you enjoy more traffic.

8. Online communities

Online communities, business listings, and media aggregators allow you to promote your website by tapping into niche audiences actively looking for specific content.

Websites like Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Designer News are platforms where you can introduce a broad audience to your tech, product, or design innovations. For example, posting on Product Hunt can help create a buzz around a new product or service. Similarly, Hacker News is ideal for sharing tech-related news.

Like Quora, you can use these forums and online directories to post backlinks to your site with the potential for high engagement if your content resonates with the platform’s community.

9. Pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a digital marketing strategy where you pay a fee each time someone clicks one of your ads. It’s a way to buy visits to your site instead of earning them organically.

Most PPC platforms, like Google Ads, use a bidding system — you bid on keywords relevant to your target audience, products, and services. When someone searches for a keyword that matches your keyword list, the PPC platform runs an action to determine how to display ads and their order.

PPC advertising is an excellent, cost-effective option for enterprises and startups alike. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, while most platforms allow you to set a budget cap to control spending. After hitting the budget cap, the platform prevents your ads from entering auction until the next budget period begins.

10. Giveaways

Giveaways can quickly generate excitement around your brand, attract new visitors, and encourage repeat actions. But remember that, as a marketing strategy, giveaways must deliver a positive ROI to be worthwhile. And make sure you lay out terms and conditions upfront to avoid issues or backlash later.

Be thoughtful about the prize you offer when designing your giveaway. You must make the entry cost equal to or less than the prize’s perceived value, or customers won’t take the time to enter. So, if you aim to build website traffic, you might offer a 5% discount on services, and participants must sign up for your newsletter on your site. With a couple of clicks, they get a chance at decent savings. But traffic coming from this contest greatly outweighs that 5% discount for the winner.

Since the goal is to encourage people to visit your website, it should be the hub of your giveaway where people go to find more details. And add engaging CTAs on the giveaway landing page to encourage visitors to explore more of your site.

The right platform to grow your website

Promoting your brand requires a well-balanced approach, with a mix of strategic ad spending and organic channels. Each traffic-driving technique noted above is crucial for attracting the right audience to your website, which you can create in Webflow.

With built-in SEO features and a dedicated content management system, Webflow lets you build, optimize, and maintain sites to promote your services and improve your online presence.