So you spent weeks or even months designing and develop your precious website, are you going to leave it there catching the dust? There are a few things you can (and should) do to today keep your website alive and active with minimal effort:
A website is dead without visitors. No matter how good your product/service is, you will not make any sales if no one knows about it. Depending on the type of product/service you offer you can promote your website on the online business listing, local business listing websites, social media, and other means. Actively ask your friends and clients to refer to your website whenever possible.
One thing that we found to be very useful in promoting your website on business listing websites. You can find a huge list of them here on directorycritic.
You can also use Google or Bing or any other search engines to look for more business listing websites that fit your business. For example, a search for "new york plumber listing" returned quite a few local listing websites, some of them allow you to put your business there for free while others charge a small amount of money.
Once you get the visitors to your website, you have to present them with useful and fresh content. Ensure the information on your website is up-to-date with the latest updates about your company, products, and services that you offer. If you can (and you should) operate a blog or news section with useful content related to your company and the industry you are in. You want to create a sense of trust and authenticity via these written documents, don't just copy and paste contents you find on other sources. It's ok to take ideas and curate content from various sources, just ensure that you keep your articles and blog posts unique and helpful for your audience.
We find the free (and paid) service offered by Grammarly to be particularly helpful when writing materials for the website. If you do not have enough time (or loathe writing) then you can find a good freelance writer to do the boring job for you. In most cases, we find it very difficult for an outsider to write good content about a particular business/service because he/she lacks a deep understanding and passion for the subject.
While you are at it, it's not a bad idea to look into "guest posting" which is a nice way to get links back to your site. Basically, you can search for influential websites in your industry that accept content from outside sources (you). Most of these websites will require you to write high-quality and relevant content with certain restrictions to meet their standards, but it's well worth the effort.
Writing is not for everyone, it's a very time-consuming and sometimes boring process. There is a much quicker and easier way to keep your site alive: photos and videos. With digital cameras readily available on all smartphones and other mobile devices, it's just so easy to take a picture or a short video clip and share the moment on your website in a few minutes. You can even embed pictures from your Instagram account directly on your website to have the pictures posted on your Instagram account appear immediately on your site. Talk about laziness :)
Short tweets and Facebook status messages can allow you to keep your website visitors updated with the latest activities and works you do. You can, for example, embed your Facebook post page directly to your website and update your work progress actively throughout the day. We find this method particularly useful for creative works such as design, architecture, construction, and such. We have a few clients who use this technique to not only keep the websites active but also to communicate with clients more efficiently (and humanly).
As you keep adding new content to your website, potential issues that may affect your website performance and search ranking may emerge. Nilead platform has a built-in SEO analyzer that you can quickly run to detect the most common issues. For further inspection, you can use tools such as Semrush which offers a huge list of checks for possible on-site issues with easy-to-follow instructions to fix and improve. SEMRush offers a free package which is great for tiny websites, but their professional packages are also well worth the money if you have a large and active site. If you don't like SEMRush, there are also other alternatives such as Majestic, Raven, Moz, and many others.
