Website Publishing
Learn how to design and optimize your business website with Search Hustle.
Website publishing is the act of putting new content up on the internet. To begin with, all you need is a domain name and hosting for your website. Hosting allows you to store your website files and upload them to the website itself.
There are currently over 1.8 billion websites that publish content around the world. That may seem like a daunting number, but consider that only about a third of those websites are active. The rest are parked, or in other words, not being actively updated.
Website publishing forms the cornerstone of any online presence, as it gives you a place to put new content and materials. Let’s take a look at some of the other benefits and activities you can do with your website.
Customer Profiling, Database, and Journeys
One key advantage that a website brings you is the ability to profile your customers. This means understanding what and why they do what they do. Key profiling topics usually include spending behaviors, pain points, and demographics. There are other areas you can profile, as well.
Your database helps keep all of this information in a single place where you can access and analyze this information. A database also allows you to store information for comparison such as seasonal and time-sensitive spending habits, etc. A stable, large database is a wealth of information that can’t be overlooked.
Having good customer profiling data and a good database allows you to chart your customer’s journey. This is real-time following of a customer to see what they do, what they click, and how they behave while they are at your website. This data allows you to optimize your website with real-time analysis.
What Do my Website Visitors Want From My Website?
While you will develop a complete picture of who your online-visitor avatars are there is some content you can predict they will expect from your website. These things are part of the online experience, having them will give you a leg up on your competition. Don’t disappoint your audience and customers.
Free Knowledge: Blogs
The content of your website is king when you are engaging in website publishing. You want to put out authoritative, entertaining, and useful information. Doing so in a blog format not only allows you to publish information but keeps it humanized and interactive.
Blog posts are great at reaching out to people who are interested in your products or services. Distributing them via a cohesive online and social media marketing strategy is an effective way of utilizing your blog and content.
Your blog should also tie in with your SEO strategy. Having a great blog with informative, topical posts is not only expected by your audience, it is rewarded by the search engine.
Free stuff: PDFs, give-a-ways, discounts, subscriptions
Who doesn’t love free stuff? Free stuff comes in many forms on a website: knowledge, videos, tutorials, PDFs, actual give-a-ways, trial periods and more.
Give-a-ways should have a theme and clear rules so that everyone can understand what you’re doing. Nothing beats the excitement of trying to win something, your customers will enjoy it. You can also feature winners and prizes so that it inspires others to try, which will increase your mailing list and possibly traffic together.
It can be dangerous restricting access to content (knowledge), but sometimes that risk pays off. If you do decide to implement a paywall, make sure the content is worth it (and there are buyers), usually it’s better to give it away as free content. The benefits of both are similar it creates groups that are dedicated to your community and business (one produces an income directly while the other brings in more business via organic traffic).
Email series
There are two main kinds of Email series that you should be aware of. One is triggered based on time, and the other is triggered based on behavior. An email series is simply an automated set of emails sent out to a portion or all of your email list.
The time-based email series can be sent out to those who haven’t been active in a while, or to those who you haven’t seen or heard from in a specific length of time. It could also be a simple catch-all, sent to your entire list to ensure continued communication and engagement.
Behavior-based email series is a much more targeted and specific approach. When a customer does something on your websites, such as looking at certain products or services, you can email them. This can provide more information, or help to sway a customer who is not fully ready to commit to the purchase.
Access to archives
An archive does more than one thing for you. The first thing it does is act as a repository where all of the content you have published can go. This is nice because it allows you to review successful content or go back over things that should have worked better than they did.
The second point to an archive is if your customers can access it. This allows them to find posts they enjoyed and share them with friends. Accessible archives can also help continue to drive traffic even if they aren’t featured on the main website any longer. The more they look through the archives, the more of your content they will see.
Create a Content Strategy
Part of making a successful website and being successful at website publishing is to use it in a strategic concept. You need all aspects of your website working together in order to drive as much viewership and customer interaction as possible. Simply having the pieces in place won’t do it.
Make sure that every aspect of your website works with itself, increasing the benefit that each individual piece of website publishing will give to you. Your content, your marketing, your customers are all brought together in one place, don’t waste your chance and use it to the best of your advantage.
Utilize a Data-Driven Strategy
In order to streamline your strategy and maximize your impact, make sure to use the data available. Harnessing the customer’s journey through your website, as well as analytics such as purchasing habits, is key to successfully utilizing the power of your website.
Once you have it all tied together, your website will be generating traffic and views on its own. This is when you can truly take advantage of the power that a website gives to a marketer. You can never just sit back and rest on your laurels though because there’s always more optimization to be done and keep that strategy first and foremost in your mind.
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