Promoting Your Portfolio Website
You worked hard, invested time, money and poured your creative soul into creating a website that reflects who you are and what you do. Now, you can sit back and watch the visitors flood in right? Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is the you have taken that initial plunge in the right direction, you now have an incredibly valuable asset you can use to develop your career. The bad news is the work is just about to begin if you really want to maximize your return on your investment. Here is a quick guide on five different areas that just about anyone can do to help drive traffic to your site. Some of these are obvious, but its helpful to spend equal time in each area as a sure-fire way to accomplish your goals.
Step 1 - Exploit Your Existing Network
This is the most obvious approach and one that you have likely already done after the launch of your new site. Tell your friends, colleagues and social media followers about this place where they can learn all about you! If you are advertising a portfolio site, your network will love an excuse to go and browse your work, upcoming events, photos and more. This is more than a simple Facebook post share though, an email stating why you have the site, what you want it to do, and what people can learn about there is a great way to start generating some interest. Encourage feedback as well, these people will be your first line of defense when it comes to letting you know if things don’t work well or if your content isn’t engaging. I also like the idea of offering prizes to anyone who finds a typo or broken link - a $10 Starbucks card can save you hours of frustration trying to find out if people are getting stuck at a point because your contact button isn’t sending people to your contact page.
Step 2 - Define Your Ideal Audience
This is ideally done before you launch as it will influence your site’s design, but sometimes you need to see the content on the page before you can visualize its ultimate path and direction. Therefore, if you want to target site visitors beyond your personal network mentioned above, then you need to determine who exactly are the people that you want visiting your site. Let’s say, if your a composer of brass music and want to attract customers who will download your compositions, then where are those people coming from? Are they at universities? Band programs? How does the content on your page speak to those people? Are you trying to build a social media following? Then creating a clear pipeline between your site and your various channels is a must. Knowing who you want to visit your site will go a lot further then just hoping people visit it, because even if you happen to get a lot of traffic it may or may not be the people that will help you accomplish your goals.
Step 3 - Organic Search/SEO
A well-setup website can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you in terms of driving traffic. But for this to work it means you have had to look at your page through the eyes of Google’s web crawlers. SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) means your content is organized in a way that search algorithms can understand its relevance to what people are searching for. If people are searching for “Private Bassoon Teachers in Madison, Wisconsin” then your website better at the least mention that you are indeed a private bassoon teacher/instructor and you are based in Madison, Wisconsin. There is a lot of nuance and detail that goes into proper SEO work that I won’t go into here, but if you want to dive into this area here is a decent article to get you started.
Step 4 - Paid Search/Paid Social
This is where we start to get into more complicated territory but if you have some additional money to invest you can leverage the work you did in the previous steps (particularly if you have taken the time to identify your audience) to target some of these people directly. With Google Ads you can pay for your results to appear when people search for certain keywords. In the same example above with the bassoon teacher, if you want to appear at or near the top anytime someone searches for “bassoon teacher” in your geographic area you could theoretically do so. However, keep in mind that when you get into super niche areas google will likely make you increase your parameters. You might only benefit from paid search if you wanted to rank when someone typed “Music teacher in Wisconsin” which may or may not be helpful to your goals. Social media advertising is similar although you can usually start with smaller more targeted budgets in Facebook and Instagram.
Step 5 - Direct Marketing
Sometimes there are no shortcuts to success, and waiting for people to come to you may take too long. Therefore, going to them first should be a key part to your website promotion plan. Search online for directories of people and businesses to find emails you can start sending out. Use tools such as LinkedIn to find even more connections. You have a great asset in your pocket to help make conversations happen. Instead of attaching a resume, or a generic looking social media page, you have a website to tell your story and keep a potential lead engaged in who you are. But, most successful people in any field will tell you that if you sit around and hope things will happen, then you might be waiting a long time.
The Path Ahead
This list might seem daunting, but taking this holistic approach one step at a time is as close as you can get to a sure-fire path to success. If you are a musician who is busy practicing and perfecting your craft, make it a habit to carve out 30 minutes a day, or 2-3 hours a week, to spend on self-promotion of your self and/or your website. Because what good is all that practicing going to do if you never have an audience to hear it!
Want help developing a plan or assistance in implementing one? Shoot me a note and lets chat on how I can help you achieve your career goals.
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