We use cookies on this site to enhance your user experience
By clicking the Accept button, you agree to us doing so. More info on our cookie policy
Published: Oct 15, 2014 by C.S. Rhymes
I’m a web developer by day for a large business. Luckily, they are already very well established and they get lots of visits each day. But starting from scratch with promoting my own website has been very daunting, but also very rewarding.
I started off really excited about making my own website to help me promote my books and my blog. All I thought about was the technical side of the website, the hosting, the framework, the coding, the webdesign, but then once it was live I realised the hard work had only just begun.
Website Launch and SEO
When I was happy with my website and ready to ‘Go Live’ I launched it. To help get things going I thought I just had to tell my friends and then the visits would come flooding in. Unfortunately this was not the case. This made me realise I needed to be a bit more proactive with my website promotion.
I knew a lot about search engine optimisation so I started to enhance my site with a sitemap and improved meta tags, but this is a long term benefit so I wanted to do something with an immediate impact.
Social Media Marketing
I already had twitter and facebook accounts so I thought all I need to do is share links to my sites pages and blog posts. Again, things weren’t quite this simple. If anything, the daily social updates asking people to buy my books and read my blog ended up with me losing followers, rather than gaining visits.
This made me rethink my strategy.
How to use Social Media
I thought about how I used social media when talking to my friends and how I could apply that to promoting my website. I like to mention my friends in posts and send them links to sites that I think would interest them or help them out.
I thought about what kind of people and organisations have the same interests as me and started following them and retweeting the interesting posts as well as posting links to sites and pages I found interesting.
Next I thought about my blog posts more carefully and how to target them better. I realised that the posts I like to read are the helpful posts, such as tutorials, so I started writing posts I thought would be helpful to others. This also agrees with my books which are also written to help people out.
Mentions and Retweets
I then thought about the way I shared the posts and realised that, as I did with my friends, I needed to mention the people and organisations that were in the article. Mentions really increase the visibility and there is a good chance that the person mentioned would retweet the post, further increasing the visibility.
A mention isn’t a guarantee of a retweet, so use this along with other tools like hash tags and joining in on conversations online.
Share
Latest Posts
Hosting a Laravel app with AWS Beanstalk
There are lots of possible hosting solutions available for Laravel, from Forge, to Vapor to the new Laravel Cloud. I’ll start out by saying that these other solutions are much easier to get up and running than beanstalk, but I thought I’d share some of the “fun” I had getting it up and running.
Testing window.open() in JavaScript with Jest
I recently had to write a test for a React component that opened a new browser window. To open the new window I made use of window.open() in my code. This made the component easy to write, but I had to think a bit differently about how to write the test for this.
Why did I become a writer?
There has been a lot of discussion on Threads recently about becoming a writer, but don’t give up your day job. I have seen a lot of arguments from all sides, some people saying they became a successful full time writer, others saying they would never give up their job, then there are others who became writers full time then went back to another job. Writing has always been a hobby for me, but this discussion has made me think more about why I write.
