Get more people on your website by sharing

Website Tip #7: This tip may seem pretty straightforward but I constantly see missed opportunities for businesses sharing their website with new customers. Picture your website like a castle in the middle of the woods. Sounds random but stay with me here. You have gone to the effort to get your website published online and it now exists in the middle of nowhere. How does anyone know where your castle is? You could tell your friends and family which would create a magical path directly to your castle. However, this is a pathway just for friends and family. Unless they share it with other people this path will barely be used. You need to create more pathways and let people know.

But how do I create more pathways?

Take a step back and think about where a potential customer may be and how to guide them towards your castle. For example, you may create social media profiles for your business and generate a few followers. In this example you must make sure your website is super accessible for your followers. Therefore you are creating a pathway for all your social media followers to access your castle.

Let’s take Instagram for example. Don’t just put your website in your profile description but also share the link in your story as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Showing how to currently add a clickable link to an Instagram story

Those stories can then be added to your Instagram highlights which creates even more pathways. If you are selling products online you may even consider adding an Instagram shop which directs followers straight to the products on your online store. Don’t miss these opportunities. They can seem simple but I often see businesses not creating these pathways.

What are some other pathways?

Again, where are your potential customers? One great place is the realm of Google. As mentioned in my post Is social media an alternative to websites? - Google has billions of searches and active sessions in a day. Can someone find you if they search your direct business name? You need to make sure your website ranks well and is discoverable on their platform. One great pathway is to create a Google my Business page. This service lists your business on Google for free and makes you discoverable through both Google Search and Google Maps. You can add your website link to the listing and voila, you have just created another pathway to your beautiful castle.

Conclusion

This post is not meant to be me listing the top 10 ways to share your website for free - that may be in a future post. However, for now this is a post to get you thinking more about where you are sharing your website. Get creative and pave more paths to your website so it is no longer lost in the middle of nowhere. Excite people to take interest in your service or product and guide them to your website for more information. Even this blog post is essentially a newly paved pathway for users to find Sanico Software. Mind blown… or not, totally up to the individual reader.