So you’ve got your new website up and running and ready for launch! How exciting is that? All the hard work and elbow grease you’ve put into building a website to best show off your business and the products and services it offers have come into fruition. But now what?
It’s important that after all the work you put into making your website perfect, you now work equally hard to launch and share the website with others.
The ultimate goal for your new website design is to bring in lots of traffic and without a great plan for announcing your launch, all your hard work could go totally unseen, and who wants that? Not us! So this blog post is here to help you as a business owner prep for your websites launch day and bring in an onslaught of views.
The most important part of launching a successful website is getting your visitors INVOLVED!
You don’t want people to just visit your website, you want them to:
- Read your content
- Share your content
- Engage with your content through comments and clickthroughs
- Subscribe to your email list
To get them to do all of these things, you need to launch your site effectively and make sure it gets seen. The central goal of your website launch (after getting major traffic and engagement) should be to set up your brand as an authority, and one worth paying attention to. Your website at its best should make people think “where has this been my whole life?!” If you’re reading this I’m going to assume that your website is already there and you’re chomping at the bit to get it launched, that’s great! And it’s not all that tough to do. Here are some valuable steps to announcing your launch that you can have at the ready for when launch day arrives.
Email EVERYBODY!
And I mean EVERYBODY. Hopefully, you already have an email list for all your current and potential customers, if not, you might want to acquire that before you launch to save yourself the time of tracking people down after the fact to tell them about your awesome website. Once the website launches you should send out an announcement email to your entire email list. Tell them what makes your website great and why they should visit, but try to avoid using a pitchy tone, remember you have to back up your work and a confident tone is much better. The people on your email list are actively choosing to hear from you so don’t get anxious about bothering them, they want to know what you’re up to, so tell them, and do so in a concise and transparent way.
Get Social!
And I don’t just mean in the real world, share the news about your new website on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn pages. Does your business have a Tumblr, Pinterest? Snapchat? Share there too. If you have an audience on any social networking site you can think of, tell them about your new website and direct them to it. Use your posts to encourage engagement WITH the site, not just a cursory glance. Create some posts featuring links to your call to action or any resources you want people to look at and learn from. Make sure to keep your posts short, punchy, and to-the-point, you don’t want people hung up on the post, you want them visiting your site!
Have a Press Release Ready
Writing and releasing a press release or hiring a great writer to do so for you will help drive a bunch of traffic to your site. There are a few different sites that allow you to publish press releases directly to the decision makers and key players in your industry such as PRNewswire, and you can also send your release to any contacts you have in media that cover your industry. It’s right to be proud of all the hard work you’ve done on the website. so get it out there as much as you can! A good press release gives industry members a better look at the value of your website, provides you with valuable link backs from reputable reporting sites, and is an important part of being proactive in regards to driving traffic. Be sure to share your press release on social media as well, but don’t forget to make it as easy as possible for people to get to your site once they learn about it.
Get listed on search engines
A lot of people might not know this, but if you don’t submit your sitemap to search engines, it might as well be like your website never existed in the first place! Submitting your sitemap as early as possible is a good idea because it will give you a jumpstart on analytics and an eye into anything you might need to change to make yourself more easily found on a search engine. SEO and PPC marketing can come later, but only once you’re findable on a search engine!
Here’s how to submit your sitemap to Google.
Here’s how to submit your sitemap to Bing.
And there you have it!
These tips are a great way to get started on setting up a successful launch. Being prepared is more important than anything, so don’t wait to plan and organize for your launch ASAP! We can’t wait to see all your great work, tell us what you’ve learned about website design and launching a site in the comment below, we’d love to hear from you!
