Promote Your Site
WHY IS SITE PROMOTION IMPORTANT?
Ah, that’s because you want folks to visit your site, find the information useful, and to buy what you are selling.
In other words:
MORE TRAFFIC = HIGHER SALES
Makes sense, doesn’t it?
PROMOTING YOUR SITE
After building your site, there will be some waiting period before it gets indexed by the search engines. So what to do in the meantime?
Tell the world that your site exists, get folks visit your site, and better yet, to link to your pages and articles.
The good news is, there are many ways to achieve this!
1. Marketing Video. Submit a video of your product or service to You Tube. Make sure you include your URL (that www.yoursite.com thingy) so that folks can visit your site for more information after watching the video.
2. Socialize! Check who’s writing about the same topic, visit their blogs, post a relevant comment that references your site or a topic on your site.
3. Use Your Social Network. Use your Multiply, Facebook, MySpace or Friendster account to announce your site to all your friends. This is a particularly effective way of getting lots of visiors because it’s viral! Your friends, and your friends’ friends are included in your network and can be notified of any recent additions to your pages there.
4. Viral Email Marketing. Viral email marketing is the internet equivalent of word of mouth advertising. Send an email to all those in your email contacts list or address book announcing your website. Encourage them to pass it on because folks love to forward messages. It can be as simple as a funny photo that you took, and invite them to visit your site fore more.
5. Have an E-Group? Be sure to tell them all about your site, too! If you are not a member of one, then join a group that you and your topic can fit into.
6. Yahoo Answers. Since you are the expert on your topic, actively participate in Yahoo Answers, which means, type in the same keywords you use on your site, check those questions that need answering, and if you feel you have useful information on the topic, go ahead and say it (don’t be shy), and your answer might just get picked as the best one. Try to include a reference to your site there.
7. Contribute to Forums. Search for forum topics that contain your keywords. You can even ask the forum members for feedback on your site design, contents. Here you can put a link to your site, too. Just make sure that you are on topic, ok?
8. Write and Article on Your Topic and Submit to Article Directories. Look for article directories relevant to your website. You can find relevant directories with the familiar search technique: your keywords + article directory. Articles submitted to highly targeted directories will drive more traffic to your site and have a much better chance of being picked up as a Google backlink
If you noticed, most of the suggestions here on how to promote your site involve your searching the internet for your keywords and using different forums (like real forums, e-groups, article directories).
My tip: Be shameless and invite everyone you can invite. Just be sure you already have a site you can be proud of so that your visitors will be held captive, entranced and be eager to come back and visit you again!
