Site promotion gimmicks and traffic techniques come and go, but the ones that really work are those that stand the test of time. This article highlights what I consider to be the most effective methods to promote your web site of all time.
1. Get Your Site High In The Search Engines
Getting your site linked high in the search engines for your keywords and keyphrases.
One of the best ways to do this is to ensure your site has a good number of incoming links from quality sites - I discuss how to achieve this with relative ease below.
Also make sure that your site reflects the keywords/keyphrases that you are looking for - they should be in your title tag, your headline tags, and in your initial paragraphs. Dont however over do it, or it will look like keyword stuffing and you will do more damage than good - just make sure they are there in a natural fashion.
Dont aim for the most popular keywords, you will have a much harder time achieving success. Do some analysis using a tool such as WordTracker.com, and aim for keywords and keyphrases for which you have a fighting chance.
2. Create A Buzz
If your site offers something new and exciting, it creates a wow factor, and news about your site will spread far and wide with very little further effort on your part.
I stumbled on how effective this was myself almost by accident, when I created one of the very first popup generators online and added it to my first very amateurish web site. It was free for people to use, I did no promotion of it whatsoever, but people came from far and wide to use it, it was mentioned in many high profile ezines with large readerships, and it proved so successful that with some further development it turned into a piece of software that I still sell today on one of my sites.
3. Dont Waste Your Visitors
Every visitor that comes to your site is hard-earned - so dont waste them. You want them to come back, to return time and time again. This will ensure your traffic climbs over time, rather than remains static.
Firstly, ensure your site doesnt scare them away. Make it easy to use, visually appealing, and treat critical emails that you may receive from visitors from time to time like gold - while not all criticisms are valid representations of how the majority of visitors see your site, some of these emails can help you turn your business around if you listen in a positive manner instead of react negatively and defensively.
Secondly, try to subscribe as many visitors as possible to a list, so that you can correspond with them time and time again. Sending them news about your site for example will keep them coming back.
4. Pay-Per-Click Engines
Bidding for keywords on PPCs like Google Adwords wont usually bring you large amounts of traffic, but if you do it carefully, the traffic it does bring you should be highly targeted and therefore very valuable.
The trick is to know your stats. Know exactly what your sales conversion rates are per keyword, and how much investment on each keyword is viable for you.
For example, lets say your site sells artist pencils:
- If you are bidding $0.30 for the keyword pencil, each sale of a box of pencils brings you $10 profit, but only 1 in 100 clicks for the keyword pencil brings you a sale, you are spending $30 for each sale of $10, which is losing you a large amount of money.
- However, if you are bidding $0.10 for the keyphrase artist pencils, and 1 in 25 buys from your site, you are spending $2.50 on each sale that brings you a profit of $10, which is a profitable investment - i.e. it brings you a net profit of $7.50 per sale.
5. Strategic linking
This can be one of the most important methods to generate traffic over the long-term. Not only can you receive traffic direct from the links, the more links there are, the higher your position will tend to be in the search engines.
In my opinion, Ive never found reciprocal linking strategies particularly effective, i.e. you can spend a great deal of time building up single links to your site, and as they are reciprocal, they are not as effective as the non-reciprocal links that the search engines prefer. The fact is that search engines know about reciprocal linking strategies, and reciprocal links only tell the search engines that you have a reciprocal linking strategy, not that your site is an effective resource that other sites are willingly linking to in a more natural fashion.
The following two methods are in my opinion the most effective ways to build up links, and concentrating on these can repay dividends over the long-term:
a. Article Submissions
The idea here is that you write an article that other webmasters and publishers can freely reprint on their web sites. Other sites and publishers desperately need content - you simply provide it. The pay-off for you is that to reprint it, they have to include your resource box that contains a link to your web site, and in the majority of cases, the link will be of the valuable non-reciprocal kind.
By writing your article and then distributing it as widely as possible, you can end up with hundreds of incoming links to your site from other quality web sites. This can be the most effective site promotion strategy there is.
(For more detailed information on how to do this, you can subscribe to a free course at http://www.takanomi.com/publish-articles.php )
b. Your Own Affiliate Program
With an affiliate program, people link to your site and receive a commission on any sales that result from their referrals.
This provides a strong encouragement for others to provide links to your site - the trick is to ensure the affiliate link actually links direct to your domain and not through a third-party site, otherwise they will get the benefit from the link rather than you.
Copyright 2006 Steve Shaw
Steve Shaw provides systems and software for effective e-marketing. His article distribution system can lead to hundreds of valuable incoming non-reciprocal links to your web site. Find out more at:
To get you fast-tracked, we have included a vast selection of tips and tricks to make your online business a success that it deserves to be.
1) First of all, choose a domain name that is somehow related to the business you are in. For example, if you are looking for a domain name for your pillow business, you might want to try using a name like www.SquarePillows.com or www.PillowSleep.com. It is important to use a real domain name. Your visitors will not take your business seriously if you use a free domain name like www.tripod.com/squarepillows , or www.angelfire.com/pillowsleep . A lot of the good domain names are already spoken for, but if you are patient enough, you will search and find one that is still available. If you think that you will need more than one domain name, get that one now too, as thousands of names are taken up each day. Do a search under Google using cheap domain names as your search words. You will find some very reasonably priced domain registrars. The cheapest one that I have found so far is at www.GoDaddy.com. They are a full service operation offering web hosting and cheap, cheap, cheap domain registration.
2) You will need a hosting service for your domain name. The hosting service allows your domain name and all of its content to be viewed on the internet. This is easy to handle. You have basically two choices here. You can pay for the hosting service or get it for free. If money is not really a problem for you, then you may want to choose the paid version. Just do a search using Google with web hosting as your search words, and take your pick from the thousands of sites. You will find that the price charged varies wildly depending the services required. Now if you want to explore the free version. There are a lot of free hosting companies on the internet. The problem with these free hosting companies is that they all require some sort of pop-up banner, static header or footer banner, or both, to be placed on each and every web page. These banners can contain all kinds of advertising, and some, or all of it, may not be welcome to the viewers on your web site. The free hosting option is certainly not the best one to explore. To save you time, I would recommend www.GoDaddy.com again for the most economical hosting of your web site.
3) Once you have your domain name and hosting service taken care of, you will probably need a way of uploading your web content to your site. Sometimes your web hosting service provider includes a site manager that allows this function. If not, then you might want to look into downloading some FTP software such as WS_FTP for example at www.ipswitch.com. While you are downloading software, you may also want to add WINZIP located at www.WinZip.com to your download list. WINZIP allows you to unzip your PillowSleep file for example. A file is initially zipped to compress it for ease of downloading. To use this download zip file, you will have to unzip it first.
4) Your PillowSleep site probably needs a little more customizing. Look at other pillow sites on the internet for comparison and see what could be improved visually on your site. Does it need any flashy graphics There are many free graphics available on the internet - just do a search with google. Once you are happy with the way your web site looks, its now time to focus on that fun part html coding. Unless you are very comfortable using html coding, dont touch the html coding on the PillowSleep pages at all. If you are comfortable using hml, then you could add things like Title, Meta Keywords, Meta Descriptions, etc., which would allow the search engines to find your web site much easier. The use of keyword phrases is much more useful than just using keywords, because it makes your web site more search specific. Go ahead and add a Pillow links page too. Another tip is always keep a hard copy of your web pages somewhere, either on a floppy, cd, or dvd. There are few things worse than customizing a web site and if something bad happens to your computer or hard drive, losing the web content forever.
5) At this point, you probably already have uploaded your web site and have it online. Now you need to drive visitors to your site. One popular way of bringing traffic to your site is to use a free link exchange or free link trading service. For the free link exchange service, you just sign up and put a little bit of code on your Pillow web site (this allows other Pillow web site banners to be viewed on your site and vice versa). The free link trading service is very simple also. You simply add another pillows link to your links page and vice versa. This trading of links increases your sites popularity greatly with the search engines. One of the most important things you can do to gain traffic is to get listed with the major search engines. Go to each search engine, or use a free service like www.AddMe.com and add your web site there. There is also what is called pay-per-click search engines where you actually pay for traffic sent to your web site. Other search engines require payment in order to get listed with them at all. Yahoo is one of these pay search engines.
6) Please be advised that is illegal to Spam on the internet or via e-mail. Spamming is sending unwanted e-mails or putting internet advertising material, or internet material in general where it should not be. That being said, another method of marketing and promoting your site is to add your site to casino and gambling message boards and free for all links pages. Please check to see if it is ok to post your info there first, and in which category, and anywhere else before posting there. If you Spam, you risk losing your internet service provider, and possibly your web host with all of your web content. Its just not worth the trouble.
7) Another way of promoting your site is to add your web site address to your business cards, and/or make up flyers and posters. Dont forget to get permission before you post anything anywhere. If you have other web sites, add a banner and/or link to your Pillow site there. Make a t-shirt with your Pillow graphic and web address on it (on both sides of the t-shirt) for yourself to wear. If you want, add your Pillow graphic logo and web address to different products like baseball caps and coffee mugs, and give them away as promotional items. Buy an ad on a bus stop, or a small classified ad in the local paper, or radio ad, etc. How about getting two of those 12 inch x 12 inch sticky, bendable, removable, flat, magnet ads made up at your local printing store to put on the sides of your vehicles doors. When you drive around the city, every body will see your web site ad and when you get to your destination, simply take the sign off until you leave again. How about putting one of your Pillow flyers or small posters on the inside of your vehicles rear side glass areas. Just make sure it doesnt obscure your vision. The idea is to use your creativity here.
8) I hope these pointers are of good use to you. Good luck with your online web business!!!
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