Website Promotion

You can have the best website in the world, but if no one ever visits, it will be a waste of space, your time and marketing budget. It’s a common misconception that if you build a website people will visit it.  This is simply not true!  As with any ‘bricks and mortar’ business you MUST promote and market your website in order to ensure its value and success. “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell… and advertise”. Never is this truer than with a website– if you want to see results you MUST promote and market your website’s existence.

The first rule of website promotion is this: 

Add your website address to everything you already use to promote your business.

It’s amazing what that extra line of text does for your image and business success.

Many companies forget this very simple, but highly effective first-step. It’s no wonder there are so many website failures!

Add your website address to everything, including your:
  • Business cards
  • Brochures
  • Signage
  • Letterheads
  • Labeling and packaging
  • Radio & TV advertising
  • Newspaper and magazine advertising
  • Press releases
  • Letterbox drops
  • Catalogues
  • Yellow Pages and White Pages listings
  • Direct mail letters
  • Personalised numberplates
  • And so on.
Anything going out, or in the public ‘arena’ needs urgent attention to include your site’s address.  To achieve the above, you should create a document that will become your advertising and promotions ‘road map’.

A good start is to draft a document that will serve as an Advertising & Promotions ‘map’ for your current financial year. Many ‘dot.com’ and ‘.co.nz’ failures are companies who probably failed to systematically broadcast their site address wherever possible.

At this stage list your existing materials that require updating with your website address.  Your focus for this planning is primarily to assess timing requirements. 

Even if the website has only a ‘construction’ page at the time you prepare these updated items, you are working to ensure that everything gets updated as ‘universally’ as possible for your launch, using the same consistent messages. 

To work through updating your existing materials in a well-coordinated fashion, create a list showing the items individually (later you’ll be adding in your new ‘online activities’ and initiatives, as covered in the rest of this section).

Give each individual item its own line and show in columns their timings (such as using a ‘fill’ in the column for the corresponding month), who should action the item, what the estimated costs are, comments, etc.   A column for your comments is useful e.g., “ZB Newstalk additional voice-overs required. Get Sarah to prepare draft cover letter and purchase order for my approval”. 

Not only will this action plan help you to be more efficient, e.g., cost savings from bulk-buying media placements or multiple print jobs; but you’ll also be less likely to miss good promotional opportunities or find yourselves ‘too late’ to take advantage of benefits such as ‘early booking discounts’, etc. 

Avoid last-minute, urgent-rate jobs or ‘surprises’ (and invest those savings into your other promotional strategies).

Don’t forget, you should only be interested in attracting website visitors who will be interested in your products and services.  If you lose sight of your target market, you will waste an awful lot of time and money by attracting people who are not the slightest bit interested in what you are offering. And what’s the point in that?
You need to also think about your budget.  Your website needs to have a marketing and promotion budget. How much money can be allocated to the promotion and marketing of your website each month?

Zeald Website manager promotion products

The Zeald website manager provides several different methods to help you generate traffic to your website and measure the success of these various methods
This area includes:

Email Marketing
The Zeald email marketing module is an additional plugin which you may purchase in addition to your website. If you would like the email marketing module turned on for your website, please purchase it on http://store.zeald.com

Google Sitemap Submission
The Zeald website manager automatically generates a sitemap for your website. This sitemap is updated every time you make a change to your website. It does not include pages or products set to Hide

If your website is new, you can help Google find all of the pages within your website by submitting this sitemap to The sitemap can be found at yourdomain.co.nz/sitemap.xml

If you like you can also purchase sitemap submission from us on http://store.zeald.com

The Page priority field at the bottom of the edit content page and edit product page form in the Website administration is a feature of the Google sitemap submission. This tells Google which pages within your website are more important than others

Link Tracking
This feature allows you to create a link with a tracking ID, which you can then setup to link to pages within your website and measure how much traffic is sent from that link, also of that traffic how many clicks resulted in a sale or an enquiry.