Introduction
So you’ve got your website published on the net? You have your own great domain name and the design is so perfect. Your site couldn’t look better – and is just as good if not better than you’re competitors. But your missing the vital ingredient: traffic! In this tutorial I will explain how you can get those visitors literally flooding in!
Promotion methods
There are lots of different ways to promote your site, in this article we will look at the pros and cons of some of the different methods of website promotion. We will cover:
- Online Advertising
- Offline Advertising
- Link Exchanges
- Purchased Links
- Articles
- Directories
- Search Engine Submission
- Forum / Email Signatures
Online Advertising
There are lots of different methods of online advertising, PPC (pay per click) is the most easy to manage model, as you only pay for the visitors you get. Let’s say I run a flower website, and I convert roughly 1 in 10 visitors into a buyer, also my average order converts to $10 profit. Then if I pay 50 cents/click, that is $5 for each order. So even though I am paying 50 cents for each visitor from my PPC ads, my business is still profitable as on ever 10 PPC visitors I make $5 profit. ($10 profit – $5 PPC costs)
To find out more about internet advertising, I suggest you read this article: http://www.affiliatesrated.com/article.php?article=cpm_cpc_or_cpa
Offline Advertising
You can advertise your website with flyers, in magazines, on billboards, on television and on the radio. Although it is harder to monitor how profitable your advert is, it is important not to forget that these adverts can be just as effective as internet campaigns and often more effective. For example if I run a website selling bike parts, and advert in a cycling specialist magazine would be the perfect way to target my advert to my chosen audience.
Link Exchanges
These can be very beneficial, but only in certain situations. For example, if I run an internet shop selling PCs, and my friend has an internet shop which sells PC games, then a link exchange could be mutually beneficial. My visitors who are buying a new PC might decide to buy some new games from his site, and his visitors who are buying new game might decide it is time for a new PC so they can play the latest games and buy one from me.
Link exchanges are no longer of any real benefit from a search engine point of view, and so should only be used with the intention of getting more visitors, and not for getting higher search rankings.
Purchased links
There has been an increasing trend in purchasing links from other websites. This is because the benefit here is two-fold. Firstly, assuming the website is targeting the same market as your site, then you get a new stream of targeted visitors. Secondly, search engines see the one-way link as a vote of confidence in your site, so you can get a search engine boost. You will need to weight up the cost of the link with whether or not you think you will get a significant boost to traffic as a result.
Articles
As should be clear by now, I am a keen advocate of articles as an excellent means of website promotion. Firstly, by publishing them on your site first, you get unique website content for your site. Secondly, then by submitting it to an articles directory other webmasters will post the article on their site providing you with tons of one-way links back to your site. Although the glory days of articles are over, they are currently an under-rated method of promotion, so if you are a good writer, and have knowledge about topics related to your site which others might not know, get writing!
Directories
Directories have really frustrated me. Time and again I have submitted my sites to directories and I have only been disappointed. Firstly, it often takes ages to submit your listing, and once submitted, your listing may take ages to be accepted. Also, the benefit of directories has been hyped up, hardly anybody tries to use a directory to find what they are looking for, they use search engines. Some promote the idea that search engines use directories in calculating rankings, especially the ODP, as far as I can tell the ODP is pretty much dead with a backlog of 1000s of site submissions and editor submissions and is old news. So are directories. Conclusion: don’t waste your time on them.
Search Engine Submission
Search engine submission is the process of going to the search engine and telling them about your website by hand. I would recommend doing this for msn, yahoo and google but only when you first launch your site and they don’t yet know about it. If your site has been around for a few days and has some links from other sites indexed by these engines, this won’t be necessary as your site will already be indexed by these engines. The other search engines aren’t worth your time or effort, they will make it their business to find your site so don’t waste your time on them.
Forum / Email Signatures
Why don’t more people do this? It’s such a simple method of promotion, and it’s free! All you do is put a link to your site in your forum signature and that could mean hundreds or thousands of new links to your site depending on how often you chat in forums. With the email signatures, lets say I send a funny email to a friend, and they forward it to all their friends, all of a sudden lots more people could find out about my site. Don’t overlook this promotion gem!
Conclusion
I bet you hadn’t thought of all these different ways to promote your site! And even if you had, I’m sure you learnt something new. I hope that the article has helped you find new ways to promote your site. To find out more about promoting your website I suggest you look at http://www.affiliatesrated.com/affiliate_tips.php
Written by: Benjamin Wigoder
About the Author:
Benjamin Wigoder is a website designer, programmer and entrepeneur. He has been using affiliate programs for years and his new (affiliate programs directory) allows webmasters to see affiliate programs rated and reviewed as well as categorized to make choosing suitable programs easy.
