A successful website launch is one that will generate traffic to your new website
So you've spent countless hours getting your website designed and redesigned to absolute perfection.
You've got your mother on a video call to witness this auspicious moment.
You hold your breath and anxious click the "publish" button. And nothing happens.
No visitors. No traffic. Nothing. Not even a spam contact form submission!
If you don't carefully strategize your website launch nobody will see it. An effective web launch strategy consists of two stages:
1. Grow an active social media following
2. Publish content on your new website that is most relevant to them at the time.
To learn how to plan and execute this effective website launch strategy, read on.
How to build an active social media following
Promoting your new website is much easier if you have a group of engaged followers to show it to. So you should start growing your social media following, even before your website is built!
You might roll your eyes and think 'isn't that obvious?' Yes it is, but very few businesses nail the social media game.
The key to success is to create engaging posts that your followers will actually interact with. Not only will this deepen your relationship with your followers, but it will also help you organically grow on every social media platform. All social media platforms are designed specifically for user engagement so if you play by their rules, you'll be rewarded with greater exposure and more sweet sweet followers.
How to create engaging social media posts
To create engaging social media posts, focus on these high engagement categories:
Infographics:
Everyone loves to pour through the data points of
an expertly designed infographic. A single infographic can contain the same level of insightful information as an entire blog. That's no surprisel, a picture speaks more than a thousand words right?
Just make sure your infographic represents data that your target audience will actually find useful. So be on top of the relevant trends in your industry.
Graphs
Graphs are not as informationally dense as infographics, but they do set the stage for some bite sized analysis in your captions.
Source: theconversation.com
Sometimes your followers don't have time to fully appreciate a beautiful infographic, but a single graph is just enough to make a lasting impact.
Video content
Social video generates
1200% more shares than text and images combined. Now there's a stat you can't ignore.
You absolutely must use video content in your social post. This could include daily bite sized tips relevant to your industry or how-to videos. The goal is to actually provide your followers with value. So avoid giving your viewers motion sickness with a meaningless review of your new office swivel chair for the sake of publishing a video.
Quality always trumps quantity.
To create the most engaging videos, assume the mindset of your ideal customer, identify their biggest challenges and create video content that solves these problems in depth.
This mentality should drive all of your content production both on social media and your website.
Memes
Memes are simple to digest and oh so sharable! They have a great way of piercing through any reservations and connecting with people at a deeper level.
The colloquial nature of memes may not align with your formal
business branding. If that's the case you could aim for a more formal tone, or just skip this category of post all together.
Write empathetic captions
To tie off your spectacular social media efforts, you should support every post with an empathetic caption that resonates with your followers. Don't push for a sale in every caption, reveal the human behind the digital screen by demonstrating that you sincerely care about the success of your followers.
Seek relationships, not just followers.
If you focus on creating highly engaging posts supported with empathetic captions and you ensure that both your posts and captions offer incredible value for free, you will be head and shoulders (and even hips) above all of your competitors in the social arena!
Publish relevant content on your website
Ok, so you've got your social media game going strong and your followers fully engaged. Once your new website is launched you just announce it in a social post and you're done right?
Wrong.
This will only get your visitors clicking through to your website, it will not encourage them to engage with your website and consider converting to your offering. To achieve that, you'll need to flex your web content creation muscles *insert straining noises*
Don't just drive your traffic to a sales page. It's just a website launch relax, you can sell to your followers later, instead, drive your traffic to an incredibly valuable resource your visitors will actually want to read at that specific time.
Every piece of content you create needs to be relevant to a specific season (turn, turn, turn). Content for a website launch should be written from a different angle to a generic blog post.
Content marketing is highly complex, if it were a watch it would probably have a calculator or something.
The style of content that performs the best during a website launch is:
An ultimate guide.
Yes...ultimate!
Identify the biggest problem your target audience struggles with and create an ultimate guide that solves that issue better than any other resource on the internet.
No pressure right?
It's actually not that hard once you break down the project into two primary components.
Text and graphics
Write the best content you could possibly write and then compliment it with graphics that make your content as digestible as possible. This will ensure every dimension of your piece is highly valuable.
Your graphics should Ideally be custom made for your business and not generic stock images, this will give your branding an authoritative appeal.
For simplicity, we'll just focus on the textual component of creating an ultimate guide.
How to create an ultimate guide for a website launch
The first step is to identify a big problem your target audience is facing. There are several ways you can do this. The most obvious (and easiest) is to just ask them in a social post.
It could be as simple as the following:
"What is the single biggest problem you are facing right now? We will choose one of the responses and write an ultimate guide to solve your problem"
The beauty of this post is that ticks all of the right boxes:
It incentifies engagement.
It demonstrates that you care for your followers.
It builds suspense for the release of the content.
When your website is finally launched, your followers will have a good reason to click through to it and engage with it.
If you haven't established a strong following yet, appealing to social media might not be the best option. In that case, you'll need to do the research yourself.
Forums are a great place to find the questions your target audience is asking. Here are some options for you.
Quora
Quora is the most popular question and answer website on the internet, so it's a great resource to use for this. To use Quora, simply search a query and the result will populate all of the questions associated with that query.
For example, if your target audience is mechanical engineering students, searching for this phrase reveals some great questions you can answer in an ultimate guide:
Source: quora.com You can search more granular phrases if you want to get really specific about a certain topic.
Linkedin Groups
There are Linkedin groups for just about any industry sector. You'll need to submit a convincing request to join them though, so make sure you have the right credentials and specify a non salesy reason for joining.
Source: linkedin.comOnce joined, pursue through all of the posts to identify any topic ideas or, even better, specific questions commonly being asked.
Reddit
Reddit is another great resource. Simply search a phrase related to your audience and then subscribe to a thread (also known as a subreddit) to view member discussions. There is a caveat though, the Reddit community is ruthless when members join just to promote themselves. So if you do decide to create a post, make sure you're providing free and relevant value.
Then, once you've gained the respect of other members, you can post a link to your ultimate guide when it's ready. If your guide solves a specific pain point the members are regularly discussing, they'll appreciate your post and click through to your website.
How to structure your ultimate guide
WIth your topic identified, you're now ready to start writing your ultimate guide. To be worthy of the title of "ultimate" your post needs to be at least 3000 words long. There is nothing more frustrating to web visitors than click onto an "ultimate" blog post that's only about 1000 words in length and contains surface level information they were already aware of.
Your ultimate guide is the first impression your website will make to the public and you don't want its reputation to be tainted on day 1.
3000+ words may seem like an impossible task. What could you possibly write about for so long? The following process will help you come up with numerous ideas for your guide.
Write down all of your headings first
Writing out all of your headings will ensure your guide flows logically and that you're providing your visitors with the most valuable information.
When writing your headings, think about all of the information you visitors will be aware of and the information they want to learn, then, spend very little time on the info they are aware of and break your headings down into a logical progression towards the intended level of knowledge.
For example, if you were writing a german shepherd toilet training guide, the following title structure would be meaningless:
What is a german shepherd?
History of german shepherds.
Why you should buy a german shepherd.
How to toilet train your german shepherd.
Visitors to such a post will obviously know what a german shepherd is, and they will be shepherd owners so a section convincing them to buy one is redundant. The history of german shepherds is also worthless because it has nothing to do with learning how to toilet traini a german shepherd.
The following headline structure would be much more appealing:
Important things to know before training your german shepherd
What you will need to get started
Introducing the outdoor toilet spot to your dog
How to identify when your shepherd puppy needs to go to the toilet
Taking your german shepherd puppy to the outside toilet
How to discipline your german shepherd puppy
Etc.
Writing up your headlines is not rocket science. Just identify the learning intentions of your visitors and think of headlines that will make that information as digestible as possible.
Writing meaty content
With your headlines written out, you should be getting some pretty incredibly content ideas flowing, and that 3000 word count might not seem so unattainable after all.
Now it's just a matter of powering through the final phase of writing your highly informational content. There's a special content creation framework you can use to keep your content as meaty as possible, it's called Semantic SEO research.
This technique kills two birds with one stone. Firstly it ensures your content is packed with valuable information and secondly, it helps your article rank in Google for hundreds of different keywords. So your piece will continue to climb the Google ranks and drive free traffic to your website for many months and years to come! Not a bad way to launch your new website.
How to do semantic seo research
The key is to target the length and breadth of your overall topic, by doing so you will naturally incorporate all of your relevant keywords.
Start by identifying all of the search phrases related to your topic.
Keywords.io is a great resource to use.
If you want to see more results, you will need to upgrade to a paid subscription
List all of the relevant keywords in a Google sheet.
Next, make a list of all of the common questions being asked about your topic and list them in the same sheet. Include all of the questions you identified in your forum research. You can also find some great ideas in the related search section at the bottom of Google:
WIth your keywords phrase list and question list complete, you're ready to start writing your guide.
As you write, naturally incorporate your keywords and answer each of your listed questions. Don't worry too much about implementing the exact keyword phrasing, focus on mentioning the topic or even details of the topic. The Google algorithm is smart enough now to understand what you are referring to even if you don't use the exact keywords.
This system will help you write a guide with depth that will blow your audience away.
When you publish your guide, make sure you also include social sharing links so that your readers have the option of sharing your post to their network to further broaden your outreach.
There are social sharing widgets available as wordpress plugins you can download and install
Example of a social sharing widget - Source: accuwebhosting.comInclude a subscriber sign up form
With all that traffic flowing to your website you need to squeeze as much value out of every visitor as possible. Make sure you include a sign up form to
build your email subscriber list. Because your website launch content will be meaty and highly beneficial to your visitors, they'll be very open to signing up for ongoing communications.
With a plump subscriber list and a
well crafted newsletter, you can generate an impressive profit from email marketing.
Launching your new website.
WIth your ultimate guide now complete and published you're finally ready to launch your new website!
Create a post on social media announcing your ultimate guide to your expectant followers. Make you give them a good reason for clicking. Summarise what the guide is about and the value they will get out of reading it.
You can increase the visibility of your post by boosting it to a wider audience. Then you can use the gathered data to create
retargeting campaigns and reel in anyone that has interacted with your post.
If you've cultivated a trustworthy reputation on Reddit, announce your newly published guide there too.
Final thoughts
To execute an effective website launch you need to strategically craft content for a specific group of people and then show it to them. It's that simple. If you focus on providing your visitors with nothing short of the highest value during your website launch and beyond, you will set yourself up for a very prosperous future on the internet.