How to Promote a Website & Attract Traffic: 15 Top Ways (2023)

Building your own website is no easy feat. After spending considerable time getting your new website up and running, you might have faced another challenge – increasing the number of your website visitors.

But although this challenge looks big and impossible to overcome at first, there are lots of tried and tested tactics that you can use to attract new visitors to your business website with relative ease.

Our guide today will go over the 15 most prominent ways and help you incorporate them in your digital marketing agenda.

3 Things you Need to Know About Website Promotion

The promotion of a website can involve lots of different strategies. However, no matter which one you choose, you need to consider three general points applying to all these tactics. .

1. Every niche is different

Your target audience will have different demographics, interests, and needs depending on the niche you are operating in.

Therefore, you need to make sure you have selected the tactic and messaging that caters the best to the needs of your audience.

2. It takes time to bring results

Many of the tactics we will cover here (e.g., SEO and community building) are more effective in the long term. Their focus is more on creating a stable and sustainable flow of website traffic instead of getting you quick results.

Considering that tangible results can appear in months instead of days, you need to make sure that your expectations are realistic when choosing any of these tactics for your website promotion.

3. Never put all your eggs in one basket

Investing all of your time and resources in a single strategy is risky, as the channel you choose can fail and result in a loss of time and money. Thus, it is better to use several tactics at the same time so that if one fails, the others will keep working.

With these general points covered, we can move on to the strategies themselves, starting with social media.

Way #1: Leverage Social Media

Social media marketing is among the most popular strategies in the digital marketing world, with more than 90% of the businesses in the United States using it.

The reason behind the popularity of social media is its ability to drive traffic to your website. In fact, 75% of marketers confirm that their traffic has increased thanks to using social media.

Promoting your website on social media is not as hard as you would imagine. To have an easy start with it, here are two important tips for you to consider.

Choose the right social media channels. You need to pick the one where your audience is. For example, a B2B SaaS brand might prefer LinkedIn, while sports apparel manufacturers would choose Instagram.

Post engaging content. You can share everything, including your blog articles, videos of your products, or information about discounts and giveaways. The point here is to do it in a way that encourages people to comment, like, and share your posts.

Here’s a good example of what we’re talking about:

Bath & Body Works used its Twitter channel to announce the launch of its new product called Midnight Amber Glow. The goal of this post was to increase awareness of the new lineup and drive traffic to the product landing page.

Social media is not the only highly efficient channel for website promotion on our list. Coming up next, we have SEO, which is another well-known tactic in digital marketing.

Way #2: Harness the Power of SEO

Search engine optimization is a powerful tool for promoting your website.

With a well-executed SEO strategy, you can increase your website’s visibility on the internet and attract organic search traffic by getting to the top positions in search engine result pages (SERPs).

If you are considering adding SEO to your stack, here are three valuable pieces of advice for you to consider.

1) Make sure your website pages are optimized

Optimizing a website means changing its copy, content, structure, and other characteristics to make it more appealing to the search engine and increase the chances that your webpages will appear in the top ranks in search engine results pages.

Optimization starts with the right target keywords. SEO teams will usually perform keyword research and compare various search terms based on their volume, difficulty, intent, and other factors to find the best ones they want to target.

To make keyword research fast and effective, marketing teams use specialized SEO tools such as Ahrefs.

Ahrefs comes with a keyword research functionality called Keyword Explorer. By typing the search terms into the search bar of this tool, you can get a list of results along with their difficulty (that represents the amount of competition), their volume (how many times people search it), and other metrics.

2) Create SEO-friendly content on your blog

High-quality content is something that search engines like Google pay special attention to. Google even has a separate section in the guidelines on the website’s content quality.

But producing great content is only part of the job. You also need to make sure that your articles and posts are SEO-optimized to make it easier for the bots to understand what is written there and serve your page to the right audience.

Optimized content is usually targeting a specific keyword. For this, you need to organically put these keywords into the body of the content, as well as its header, meta title, meta description, and other parts.

3) Acquire backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks placed in the content of other websites that refer back to your site and serve as “votes of confidence” for you.

To do link building, SEO teams or specialized agencies will use tactics such as creating shareable content (e.g., original research) that others can reuse. They can also invest in hyper-personalized email outreach to build partnerships for the sake of getting high-quality links. 

Alright, we covered some of the most important aspects of search engine optimization for you here. But we are not done with it yet, as there are a couple more SEO-related strategies we will talk about later. But for now, let us move away from this topic and discuss another prominent channel – email.

Way #3: Use Email Marketing

Email marketing is another significant channel in the digital marketing industry, with its revenue expected to reach $13.7 billion by 2025.

Marketing teams like and constantly use this channel as it comes with low costs, ease of personalization, and a high return on investment of £35 for every £1 spent.

If you’d like to take advantage of emails too, here are some steps you can take:

Start building an email list. You can put email signup forms next to your content or open popups that offer special discounts when users subscribe to your newsletter.

Create a regular newsletter with compelling content. There are two key factors here. The first one is the regularity of your emails, as you want to keep your subscribers engaged. The second one is the quality and the relevance of the content in your newsletter, as people will stop opening your emails if you keep sending content they are not interested in. There are more best practices to follow too but it is a story covered in our separate guide. 

Now let’s see what an email marketing campaign looks like with the example of Atlassian.

Atlassian is a company that makes software development and management tools. Their newsletter here talks about feature rollout, which is something relevant to Atlassian’s existing and new customers. Thus, many of the email recipients will click on the “Read more” and go to the Atlassian website.

With emails covered, let us check other well-performing approaches such as forums.

Way #4: Post on Forums (Like Reddit and Quora)

Online forums are a hub for many users to gather and discuss various topics, share thoughts and ask for advice.

As a digital marketer, you can use forums to increase brand awareness and promote your website.

Here is how you can do this depending on the type of question in forum threads.

Asking for a product or service recommendation. Your answer to these questions can showcase your products along with the reasoning why people should choose you.

Seeking knowledge on a specific topic. Here you can share a relevant article or guide from your website that people can read to get their answers.

To see how you can promote your guides and articles on forums, let’s look at a question on Quora about the difference between product marketing and regular marketing.

The answer here provides a comprehensive explanation of the difference between the product and ordinary marketing and links to a guide on product marketing strategies on the author’s website.

Your online presence in forums and communities is a valuable way to promote your website. With this channel covered, let us return back to SEO with the guest posting strategy.

Way #5: Find Guest Blogging Opportunities

Guest posting or guest blogging is the practice of writing new content that will be published on other websites.

Although you can use this tactic for a variety of reasons, it is most popular for being a tool to acquire backlinks.

As a guest blogger, you can add links pointing to your website both in the content of the article and in your author bio. When the website publishes your content piece, you will get one more backlink to your website.

To find websites open to publishing guest posts, you can use Google’s search operators and search for keywords such as “write for us” or “submit a guest post”. Alternatively, you can use guest posting services to handle it for you.

Here is what the query looks like.

In this particular case, we have searched for websites that are accepting guest posts on the topic of NFTs and cryptocurrency.

So far, we have talked about tactics that can work both for online businesses and those with a physical location. However, our next strategy is specifically made for promoting local businesses.

Way #6: Post Content on Your Google Business Profile

As a local business owner, you probably have a Google Business Profile (a.k.a. Google My Business) that lets you appear in Google search results and Google Maps.

What you might not know is that Google Business Profile lets you make short posts and updates that will appear in both search and maps.

Although these posts are relatively simple (allowing basic text, image, and a link), you can make them a source of traffic to your website by posting your latest events, special discounts, or product updates and adding a link to your website underneath the post.

Here is how Starbucks uses them.

They have used the Google Business Profile Posts to announce their new service of ordering coffee in advance.

Google Business Profile is not the only tactic for promoting local businesses that we have on our list; there is another one coming up next.

Way #7: Get Listed on Relevant Directories

If we are working on the promotion strategy of a local business, then using business directories (e.g., Yelp, Craigslist, etc.) is another common channel that you can use.

These are specialized websites that users browse to find specific services or companies in their area. Here is what an online directory looks like.

The website here is Carwise which lists companies in the automotive niche. Our search query was for body shops in Detroit, and Northend Collision Shop appeared as the top result. Being the top result means that this body shop will likely get considerable traffic on their website from the people looking for this sort of business in Detroit.

This was our last local business-specific tactic. Moving on, we will discuss ways to promote your website that apply both to online and physical ventures.

Way #8: Engage in Online Communities (Or Start Your Own 😉)

As we have already covered the topic of using online communities such as Reddit or Quora for your promotion, let us focus on the idea of creating your own community as another tactic you can use to drive traffic to your website.

The main benefit of having your own forum is the control over the content that you post. You have to be careful with your posts on Reddit and Quora in order to pass moderation (as they can mark your comments as spammy), but here you are your own moderator and have the freedom to post anything you want.

The good news is that starting a community is not hard at all. There are lots of forum management tools, such as MyBB, bbPress for WordPress, and others you can use to instantly generate a forum on your website.

Here is what such a forum looks like.

This particular community belongs to the YouTube tech channel Linus Tech Tips. They use this community as a tool for communicating with their audience and keeping them engaged with their brand.

Way #9: Syndicate Your Content

If you are already engaged in content marketing and have a team that maintains and promotes your blog, you can consider using content syndication as another way of promoting your website.

Content syndication is the process of republishing a piece of content on multiple websites. For authors, this tactic is a way to increase the reach of their content, while for websites, it is an easy way to publish a new piece of content for their readers.

There are several common tactics for doing content syndication, including:

• Publishing the original article on a large media outlet, then republishing it on your website.
• Getting your content piece live on multiple websites simultaneously, including yours.
• Publishing first on your website, then posting the content on Medium or LinkedIn.

Below is an example of the latter type of content syndication.

The Medium post here is a syndicated article from the website benpdavis.com. The author used Medium as an extra channel to attract more readers and traffic to their website.

While syndication was mainly about written content, our next tactic focuses on live view.

Way #10: Run a Webinar

The chances are high that you have already taken part in a webinar of some sort to learn something new in your profession.

Webinars are a great win-win tactic for both companies and viewers.

Viewers use webinars as alternatives to tutorials for learning a new skill and benefit from the expertise of the webinar host.

Companies, on the other hand, use it as a marketing tool to increase the brand’s reputation in the eyes of their viewers and to drive traffic to their website.

To promote their webinars, companies will make posts about them on social media, send email invitations, and showcase them on their website, as in the example below.

iZooto is a web push notification SaaS service that runs webinars so often that it has a dedicated page on their website.

Continuing with the topic of multimedia content, let us move on to podcasts.

Way #11: Get Featured on Podcasts

Podcasts are a popular way for people to consume content, with approximately 40% of Americans listening to podcasts on a monthly basis.

If there are podcasts in your industry, you can consider reaching out to their authors and asking them to feature your brand or your products in one of their episodes.

One way to get featured in a podcast is to appear in episodes where podcast authors talk about the tools and solutions in their industry. If you are in the management niche, they can discuss org chart creator tools, while marketing podcasts will have something like this.

This particular episode we have featured lists the tools for managing audience insights.

With the podcasts behind us, too, let us move on to one of the most traditional tactics in digital marketing – ads.

Way #12: Invest in Paid Advertising

While SEO and community management are long-term tactics that show results in weeks or months, paid advertising (a.k.a. PPC) is their short-term counterpart for attracting traffic in hours or days.

Websites can use paid ads for many reasons, but the most common goals are to make a quick traffic boost or promote certain deals and discounts.

Digital marketers have a wide variety of options when it comes to advertising. Some of the prominent ways are:

• Social network ads (e.g., Facebook ads or TikTok ads).
• Banner ads (via Google Ads – formerly Google AdWords, Bing Ads, or other tools).
• Web push notification ads.
• Video ads.
• In-app ads.

Search engines also allow you to buy search ads for the keywords of your choice. These ads let you appear on the top 1-3 spots of the SERP for that particular keyword, as evident in the example below.

When you Google “task management tools”, you will see Notion and Asana in the top spots. But instead of doing exceptional SEO for appearing there, they have bought paid ads from Google for this keyword.

After featuring a short-term tactic, let us return back to the long-term ones with partnership management.

Way #13: Create Partnerships

One valuable tactic many digital marketers often overlook is doing cross-promotions.

The idea behind this tactic is to find and partner up with KOLs in your industry and help promote each other using both of your channels.

This is, again, a win-win approach. KOLs will get more exposure by appearing in your social media posts, email newsletter, and website. You, on the other hand, will be able to tap into the new audience of the KOL by appearing in their posts and content.

To find KOLs, you can use influencer marketing platforms or search your industry hashtags on social media. We have this part, along with an explanation of the KOL creator economy, covered in more detail in our KOL guide.

Here is a typical example of a KOL and a brand partnering up to do cross-promotion.

The Key Opinion Leader, in this case, is digital marketing expert Neil Patel, promoting DMI Group in one of his tweets.

Continuing with our list, we have another tactic that revolves around community management.

Way #14: Engage with Others Online

While being an active member of communities is valuable, it is not the only way to reach out to your potential audience. There is also the tactic of actively engaging with your followers and other businesses on social media.

These engagements can be anything, ranging from making funny comments under others’ posts to addressing the concerns of your existing or potential customers and answering their questions, just like in the Tweet below.

ClassPass serves as a great example of the brand talking directly to its audience on social media platforms as a way to increase its brand reputation and generate more sales.

Continuing with the topic of social media, let us move on to a tactic that is quite quick and easy to do.

Way #15: Link to Your Website from Other Channels

Our last tactic for promoting your new site is also the quickest and simplest one to do on our list.

Assuming that you already know how to promote a website on social media and run multiple channels, you might also want to consider placing the link to your website in the profile description or channel description of all of them. Here is what it would look like.

Finnair, the national air carrier of Finland, has added a link to its website to increase the chances of people visiting its website after they have opened its Twitter profile.

Now Over to You

Promoting your website is not as hard as you might have imagined. You can choose one or some of the tricks and tactics to drive traffic to your website that we shared with you for this purpose and reach your marketing goals with ease.

If you loved this guide, consider checking out other helpful articles we have about digital marketing in our blog.