Lots of companies do the following mistake - invest to the creation and design of the website, but do not reserve any investment to marketing and updating the content. Then the bosses of the company come to one of employees and tell to make it popular and always updated. Employees are lost, as they simply do not know what to do. Here is some advice to such type of employees who just got the huge burden - represent the company Online.
There is a saying “a good beginning is half work”, but it cannot be applied to the website building. Creating a corporate website or website with services and products presentations is just 10% of the job. The rest 90% is marketing the website.
Updated content - the key to success
The website which is not changed at least 1 time a month is doomed. Think any reason to update it every week. The best way to update the site is writing some news about new projects, acquisitions, cooperation, new employees who joined from other companies (experts of their field only), financial results if public, new company staff activities (for examples all employees agreed to support some ecology project or spent weekend helping some people in need community), etc. If you have listed your 20 services in 1 page, please consider describing each service in a separate page and link to it from a list. This will create you additional content and will increase the possibility, that you will get more traffic from search.
Company blog should be updated at least once a week. The blog is more unofficial venue, therefore content can be written from first person. Also if there are no any ideas, some interesting videos can be collected in Youtube with funny advertisements of your market products and services. Also Some research presentations from SlideShare can be added with a short introduction texts. This way you will be able to keep the blog updated and most important INTERESTING to read.
If company website has got blogging options - even better as there the blog can be written by few employees sharing some expertise on the field you work in. If you can invest little more in improving the website, please consider launching the Wordpress based company blog. You do not need to make new design as you can adjust the themes of Wordpress to your corporate style. The only expenses can be the subdomain redirection to blog.yourcompany.com and hosting.
If you can convince your network of people to tell more about your company to their relatives, friends and colleagues, you have reached your goal. Simple example. You told your 10 friends about your brand how good it is. They have told their 10 friends about your brand because it seemed really good. How many people now think that your brand is good? 10+10x10=110 people. Imagine you have convinced 100 of your so called social network “friends” who has also at least 100 “friends”, so you can easily reach the audience of 100+100x100=10,100. I did not consider the 3rd level of information which you cannot see and control anyway, but still it adds even more audience. Of course, these counting are theoretical as not all of these people will see the message and visit the link to your website, however they will remember your brand name.
The networks of friends are available in majority of social networks. Another issue is personalization. In most of social networks you are requested to be yourself as real person with real name and surname. In this case, make sure that you present yourself as representative of the company. Just write “I work for company X and here is the website for more information” in your profile. Facebook is the best social network for company branding as it has FaceBook Pages feature allowing to speak on behalf of your company. Create the page for your brand and update it every day (or at least 2-3 times a week). Post some links, videos, pictures, funny cartoons etc. just to update your fans with some information. Make sure the time is right, because no one will see your message if you post it when everyone go to bed.
Use Twitter to update your followers with the newest content updates. If people ask for help, you can use your Twitter account as customer support. Some huge companies (I have in mind Zappos success story) already used that and received lots of attention and traffic.
You can spend up to half an hour a day to login to 3-5 different social networks and do some activities if time is a problem.
Blog Comments - discuss topics you like and promote your brand
Blog is a place for discussion. Someone initiates and expects comments. Almost all blogs has comment forms where you need to enter your name (you may try to enter the name from company, for example “John from Company X” or “Katie of Brand X”), email (optional) website and comment text. Make a goal to yourself - set number (for example 3 per day) of comments posted in blogs you read. Make comments about anything you want, express your own personal opinion, but do not mention your website URL in comment text. Comments should be critique, confusion, excitement, suggestions, but never “Nice blog”, “I think the same too”, “Well done! Good luck in future!”. Such type of comments will be deleted and you may be banned as spammer, so will not be able to comment in the same blog again. If you can participate in discussion, please participate, because bloggers love when readers fight just below their blog post. With the time you will find your favorite blogs and will become a regular commenter, so other regular commenters will recognize you. New people will observe your discussion and will try to find out who you are by clicking on your name which directs to your website. Mission accomplished - you have traffic from comments.
Beware of writing curses or not appropriate issues as this does not help to keep good reputation for you and your company/brand. Find some blogs about the industry you work with, so you will be able to show the level of your expertise in comments. Keep in mind that some companies who are looking for partnership make investigation about some brand visibility in the social media, therefore they can find you.
The same principles can be applied to various forums. There you will not have the link to your website, but some of forums allow that in signatures (some have the rule that you can add signature only when you collect lots of messages).
You can spend up to half an hour a day or even less if you already are a regular commenter.
Social networks - free traffic
Hopefully you work in a company with mild security policy allowing you to have your account in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, FriendFeed etc. If you are buried below various firewalls and blocked ports with some internet content blocks (personal email, Youtube and other social network content may be distracting you from your direct work), I am sorry, but either you will need to promote your company at home or do not do this at all. If you are allowed to communicate easily and spread the word about your company and your brand and in some cases you are paid extra for that, please use all possible channels for that. But do it little by little otherwise your good will to let people know about your company services can become a regular spam.
The biggest social networks are Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. If your company works in some local market, please find a local social networks as they may have even bigger audience and traffic than these global ones.
What you need to do there? Just collect as much friends as possible. Remember your high school classmates, college friends, former colleagues, family members. Also look for people who have similar interests. Get into “friendship” with people from competitor companies. Once you have some friends, you can start providing some specific information about what you do, what values your brand has, what are some industry news. Suddenly some links to your website pages appear among these links and resources, so it does not seem like spam.
Remember the golden rule:
You advertise your brand not to your friends, but to Friends of your Friends
Social bookmarking - not big but still traffic
Social bookmarking sites are those where you can submit the link. Voting for the link make it more popular and higher in the lists. You may know some most popular social bookmarking sites: Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz (and 20 others). The best option is to find local or interest based social bookmarking sites as they attract the specific audience from your country and even with some particular interest.
Once you add the link, make sure you do not copy the text from the page you are adding as description. Write your own with some intrigue. If you tell everything what is in your page, people will not be interested. Another step is voting for such link. Please make a mailing list of your colleagues and friends who may vote for this link just because you have added it. Try to have your voters in different places as there may be 1 voter per IP restrictions, so your entire company may have 1 vote only. Some of social bookmarking sites require registering. Please ask your friends to register once so next time they will not need to do that again. Sometimes publish the page of your link in social bookmarking site in other social networks - Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc. it may attract people who did not trust your links and did not click them on purpose.
Do not push your links too actively - your links may be voted as spam, so you and even your website can get banned for such “diligence”. Please set some schedule of social bookmarking link posts. For example on Monday you post 1 your website link to Delicious and 1 non your website link to StumbleUpon; Tuesday - 1 your website link to StumbleUpon and 1 non-your website to Digg etc.
news-sources
If your company has PR agency, well, let them work, but also suggest some additional sources.
If you have a blog about your industry, you can try to submit them to blog feed aggregators. Most popular worldwide news aggregators are Technorati.com, AllTop.com, POPurls.com. You can also find the local ones and interest based ones. There are some other blog feed aggregators where you can submit your blog RSS feeds.
Article writing can take up to 3 hours per week.
There are some more ways to promote your website for free, but it depends on your audience. If you can use the mentioned ones you can spend mostly 1.5 hour a day to advertise your website and business. Just plan some work and you can definitely make your business booming. The traffic counter will show where the traffic is driven from, so you can show it to your management and ask a bonus for this hard work. The main issue is that you will not spend a penny, just your costless time. Good Luck!
This work will take up to 15 minutes a day.
Articles about your business to other sites - good for branding
There are lots of article directories where you can publish your article in English. If your business is local, you should find some local ones. The articles should be creative and non-spam, so before publishing the article about your business please give it to read to some friends of yours who are not involved in your business. They can tell if they found this article boring, full of technical terms and advertisement of your website. 1 link to your website per article is absolutely enough.
Do not publish same article to 10 different article directories, because people will think that someone published stolen content. Also it is bad for search engines as Google does not like duplicated content.
If you have some serious news about your company, please arrange the press release. You can publish this press release to few Free Press Release sites. No need to publish it in 20 places. 5-8 is absolutely enough. Which of them are good? Actually all, but some are better than others. Those press release services which publish articles to Yahoo! News and Google News are the best. How you can know that? Just observe the sources in Google and Yahoo news. Google News is just one of most popular News Aggregators, so you could submit your website news to another ones.
