Website Promotion

There are two things you should always be doing:

1. Improving your content
2. Improving your traffic

These two are similar, as your content is what brings your visitors back for more, but you will also have to focus on promotion methods - otherwise you will have a great site with very few visitors.


How to improve web content:

You might already have perfectly optimized, search engine friendly content. If that is the case, move on to the section on web promotion. But if you are like most webmasters, you will be continuously trying to improve your content - not just for the search engines, but for your visitors.

The content of your site depends on many factors, and some of the ideas I will present are not necessarily appropriate for your site - decide what improvements to your content will be most appreciated by your visitors, and begin applying those changes today.

If you have a content page (as opposed to a ‘mini-site’ or a sales page), an up-to-date article or two related to your keywords can go a long way. Your users will appreciate useful information, and the search engines love keyword-rich articles.

There are two ways you can use articles on your page:

1. Manually find 1-2 good articles several times a week, change your webpage, and re-upload every few days with your new articles in place,
2. Use an ‘article-of-the-day’ script. These are great for your users and search engines - every day, you will have a new article related to your topic. You can get free scripts (just search “article of the day script” without the quotes), use a paid script with more features, or you may get ‘content management’ scripts with your hosting. You might pull articles from other sites (make sure they allow this), collect articles into a database on your site, or even build your own article directory filled with content.

This is very useful in improving your search engine rank, and will also have your visitors coming back daily! Good results for 15 minutes of work (if you use a script). Check your articles to make sure they are relevant to your topic, to ensure that you will get better rankings, and so you get targeted visitors.

If you cannot find articles for your industry, you can try adding mainstream news articles to your site (unless this would be entirely irrelevant). This could bring some traffic, and ensures that your site is updated frequently.

Another way to improve your content is to continuously look for new products, services, special deals, or anything else that will provide value to your visitors. If you aren’t sure who your visitors are, take a step back, search for “finding your target market” and “free keyword analysis” to find tools that will help you determine your target market (if you need advanced information about your market, there are several paid tools available to help - search “niche marketing” or “targeted advertising”). Example - if you have a site about traffic generation techniques, you could add a “free traffic tip of the day”, a new daily marketing article, and a new product to help generate traffic each week. That should give your page more value to your visitors and search engines.

As you can see, improving your content will bring you more traffic, but you probably know that content is not enough. If you have the best content on the web, but do absolutely no advertising, you will not get any traffic (other than your own visits).

So, how to advertise your site - this is not as difficult as most ‘gurus’ would have you believe. If you have a marketing plan, and you know your target market, you will not have a problem getting traffic.

There are two ways to advertise your site:

1. Advertise for free
2. Pay for advertising

Free hits to your site are great, because there is almost no way to lose money this way (you can lose money if you get millions of ‘hits’ that have no interest in what you offer - you might pay bandwidth overuse charges).

How to effectively advertise without spending a dime:

• Test your ads! This is the most important part of using free or paid advertising. Some things will work for one of your sites; the same strategy may fail to get one visitor for another site. Test and refine, figure out what advertising strategy works best for each site, and watch the money start coming in!
• Use forums! Go to discussion boards related to your site. Post questions, answers, special offers, or good information. Always read the rules of the forums, and don’t spam (post something useless just to get your link on the site). If you have something useful to say, people will click your link to see what other valuable things you offer.
• Post to classifieds! Especially if you are selling something. Post classifieds in your category to get more free targeted advertising. There are also programs that let you submit one ad to many sites. If you find that classifieds work for you, consider getting a submitter to automate your classified advertising and bring you more traffic!
• Use traffic exchanges! These are programs where you earn advertising credit for viewing other member sites. You may have to view 2, 3, or 4 sites for each visit to yours, or there may be a paid version that gives you more traffic. Note: I would recommend that you do not use ‘autosurf’ exchanges - even though you will build up credits quickly, you will rarely get conversions from this traffic. For a list of good manual traffic exchanges, search ‘manual traffic exchange’ or visit The Internet Income System. You will earn credits when your referrals surf, so promote the exchanges as well. In time, you may be able to stop surfing and still get plenty of traffic from traffic exchanges!
• Exchange links! This is important for your search engine rankings, but most people forget that the links themselves will also bring you traffic. Don’t exchange links with irrelevant sites - make sure the links you ask your visitors to follow will give them something of value. This will ensure that the reciprocal link to you will also bring visitors that are interested in seeing what you offer!
• Here’s one the masters never mention: Newsgroups. Yes, good old Usenet. Post articles, questions, or answers related to your website topic. You can’t use HTML, so no live links, but there’s no reason you can’t put your URL in your post (again, don’t spam). You can also get responses via e-mail, and build valuable relationships with other members who frequent your topics. This is a great way to get customers, business partners, link partners, and even free advertising! Your Usenet posts can remain on the ‘Net for years, so make sure your post is useful - read any posting guidelines and tips for the newsgroup before posting.
• Submit to directories! Directories list sites by category, so you will get targeted traffic this way. Some directories are free, including dmoz.org - The Open Directory project. It will likely take a few weeks before your site is included (if at all) but you should still submit it for free. Some sites charge a fee to be included in their directory. You may decide to buy a paid submission if you want a one-way link from a high-traffic page, or if you feel that you will get a lot of quality traffic. The main advantage of paid inclusion is that your site can be active in the directory within hours, so you may start receiving traffic immediately.
• Other free techniques: submit to smaller search engines, write articles, use viral pages, give away free reports with your links (make sure the report is useful and has value), give away free software, build your mailing list, and more.

If you spend 2 hours per day focusing on the of the above techniques, you will:

• Quickly get indexed in the search engines
• Begin seeing more traffic
• Improve your search engine rankings- Get quality backlinks

I would suggest splitting up your time as follows:

Each day, spend 1 hour surfing for traffic credits on at least 2 or 3 exchanges at once (if you want to learn how to maximize your surfing credits, go to The Internet Income System and sign up for my newsletter, or just send me an e-mail). This alone should get you at least 20 hits per day (usually much more).

Spend at least 1 hour on only one of the above techniques. Example - Post to 50 newsgroups on Monday, submit to 20 directories on Tuesday, make 10 forum posts on Wednesday, etc.

If you keep up this technique, within one week you should see significant results, and within several months your traffic should be through the roof!

Sometimes, you need to get visitors to your site immediately after it goes live (maybe you have a limited time offer, or cutting edge information that won’t be relevant in a month). If this is the case, consider adding paid ads to your marketing arsenal. There are many ways you can buy traffic to your site:

• Pay-per-click advertising! This has become one of the most popular ways to advertise on the ‘net. You have seen PPC ads everywhere (they are probably all around this article). Why? Because they work - context targeted ads ensure that visitors are offered sites related to the one they are on, so you get targeted visitors. Unfortunately, PPC ads are based on bidding on keywords, and there are ways you can lose thousands of dollars a month if you are not careful. If you wish to use PPC ads, make sure you do the research - know how much it will cost and how much you will gain. It is important to test frequently with PPC ads. Use the free keyword tools available to optimize your ad campaigns, try to buy keywords that are frequently searched and seldom advertised. Set your limits carefully, and know how much you can realistically afford to spend each day on clicks.
• Expired domains! Amazing idea, here’s how it works: You either buy up domains as soon as they expire and redirect their traffic to your site, or you can pay companies that resell expired domain traffic as a number of hits per month. Either way works great, here’s the difference:
• If you buy your own domains, it will only cost about $6/year per domain. But, if you pay for monthly traffic, you will not have to do all of the research to ensure that the domains you get will bring you quality, targeted traffic. Also, most of these companies bring you traffic from hundreds of related domains, so you will are more likely to get interested visitors.
• Other paid advertising options: solo e-mail ads, newsletter/eZine ads, banners, text, image, and video ads. These have varied costs, and it would be difficult to tell you how to use these methods for your website, so if you would like to try some of these forms of advertising, make sure you research how to write ads for that tool.

Always analyze your spending when you use paid advertising. Improve your ad copy, ad placement, and visitor targeting - you are spending the money, make sure you get the best possible ROI.

That should get you well on your way to a profitable, valuable website. Remember to stick with it, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If an advertisement is not working for you, stop using it. If something is working well, keep doing it. Try to improve your overall marketing strategy slightly every single day, and you will soon have a wonderful website generating tons of quality traffic!