When your starting out, trying to get a brand name out there, or trying to get your work viewed on the world wide web there are ways you can help your website gain traffic and Google rank. Without breaking the bank. The best way is to pay for someone to come in and do it for you, but if your starting out, you may not have the budget to hire some one to run your website!
You need to concentrate on selling/making/services, as this is where your life savings have gone, and you want your selling/making/services to be your top priority, not 2nd or 3rd.
I have constructed a 2hr a week strategy to help push your website. This can be done 40min every evening, or all done on a Friday evening or even a weekend, it is up to you. This plan was originally constructed for my students at Rowden Farm Studios, but I have decided to to share this as it has had some very positive feed back.
This structure is based around once a "Content Management System" website has been made and is already online. CMS websites are very useful, and is what I create for each of my students.
So I will focus in on what has worked for my student, and implement this into something which will take you 2hrs a week.
First, before we can start this process I suggest you sign yourself up with Facebook, Twitter, ping.fm and Ezine.
With ping.fm you can send out a broadcast message once and it pings it to all your social networking sites, so if you fancy it go ahead and sign up to the other social networks if you like.
Ping is free, easy to use, sign up with and email, tell ping your social media networks and away you go, ping stuff about.
OK, the strategy will depend on what you are wanting to so I will cover a couple areas.
- Made a new piece of work, so lets push the gallery page.
- Upload your new image to the gallery and add text if needed. Using the Content Management System website, this should be a doddle depending on your website structure. Re-size image, upload image to page, write your jargon. - 20mins
- When I create websites for customers or students I create custom twitter and Facebook buttons implemented into each page, so go ahead push these buttons and post to both Twitter and Facebook in two clicks easy. If You didn't make the buttons then do so, upload image of a button you would like to use (there is loads of free ones) and add a link to the desired url. Even to put the buttons on the page from scratch your looking at 25 mins work (i have linked to how to create the link for custom buttons within the resource box).
- Have an emailing list? Or even a Facebook full of friends, send them an email about your new work. If your doing the Facebook way you can create a list of friends and email the list instead of having to type each individuals name, or if you have a Facebook group you can message all users in one go. - write a draft email and send it out - around 30mins.
- OK that is 1hr 5mins and we have not only added a new image to our gallery, we have screamed out this message to possibly hundreds of people. So Your left with 55mins you can either go through and respond to emails, check your title and meta of the web page and see you can think up something better, or you can just kick back and have a cuppa.
- Want to drive some traffic to your website for keyworded terms.
- Write an article no longer than 500 words, this can be a top 10, general advice, anything which ties in with the keywords your wanting to link back to your site. So what article to write?, if your making chairs you could post a top 10 chair designs, or an article on what makes a good chair, basically any worthy advice to do with chairs. I would say this can take 1hr 30mins.
- So with the 30min you have left write your resource box, the place you can put your links and submit. It is very good practice to have 3 or 4 resource texts ready to be copied and pasted in with your planned anchor text, once you have a view resource texts to choose from this job will only take a minute.
- Once your article has been accepted (you will be notified by email) view your article, whilst your NOT logged in, and use the bottom social media buttons to FB and Tweet your article, a nice easy 2 second job because the buttons on ezine have been coded to enter a good enough title and tag.
- Want to make a new page to your website.
- Draft out the content for your new page then copy and paste the text into your cms website, all you will need to redo is select the titles and give the either a h1 or h2 title tag. time depends on content so for a smallish page lets say 1hr.
- Re-size and transfer images to relevant positions in the page, set alignments ect. Whilst adding the images also upload the twitter and Facebook button and link these. 30mins
- Think about Title and Meta, and implement, (thinking about your keywords) remember these can be adjusted at any time so you do not have to be to anal. 20-30mins.
- Save and push your twitter and Facebook buttons to publish your page to them.
- To blog.
- You can chose to blog daily weekly monthly, its up to you. I can make you a blog page via your site, or your can choose to set up a external blog such as blogger and implement a rrs feed into your site.
- I think a good start is to blog about your week, so you can talk about achievements, experiences, exhibitions, work in progress, any of these areas.
- So login into your site weather this is blogger or your actual site, and write about your week or whatever it is you want to talk about. To put a time on this depends on a person, but you can easily do a blog in 15min.
- Upload some imagery or your workshop, the work in progress 10-15min.
- Add the social media buttons and link them up not even 5mins
- After saving the blog post the blog to FB and twitter by pushing those one click buttons.
- There you go, you've blogged which adds content and you've told who you know on the world wide web that you have blogged, which should drive some traffic.
- Do not forget to link from the body text of your blog to your main pages:)
- Facebook and Tweet pages relating to you, or just Facebook and Tweet your content.
- If you know of a reliable source linking to you, FB and Tweet about that page (The more traffic a link gets the more worth while that link becomes). Want to remind people about your page, FB and Tweet about it again. FB and Tweet about important news, exhibitions your taking part in ect.
- You can Facebook and Tweet at the same time using a ping.fm account, you sign up, input your facebook and twitter account, then you you have to do is write the content once and ping it to both sites. Amazing. Even to do a few posts this way will take you no longer than 20mins
- As it is good to promote web pages linking to you, message people about them to (as long as the site is worth while).
- To email out and to promote.
- Email out to possible clients and old clients, stories, updates. Find reasons to link back to your content.
- Again here you can use a email list you have built up or you can use your Facebook list. You can easily let 2hrs slip away writing a promotion. After you posted it out you can have a online version on your blog or site and again upload the twitter and Facebook buttons and post to both.
- To Poll, ask opinion to generate more content.
- Generate Polls, small questionnaires and ask opinions.
- FB and Tweet out about the poll, Tell your your clients about your poll via email lists or FB list. Get them to come back to your website to take the poll.
- What should take a poll or ask opinion about? Well think about your content, do you make chairs? poll about types of design and styles. Why should you do this?, well believe it or not you may never like to do online polls or questionnaires, alot of people like to take part or voice an opinion.
- With the answers can feed fuel for more articles:)
