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Tuesday, May 29, 2007
So, you've spent some long, hard hours and invested your hard-earned money into creating the perfect website for your business. Now its time to start promoting. But what exactly does that little word, "promote", mean? Well, to tell you the truth, it doesn't have ONE meaning. It has a LOT of meanings, or at least you might say it has a lot of different elements.
Many people believe that all they have to do is submit their site to the search engines, and sit back and wait. Actually, there are a lot of people who think that all you have to do is build the site, put it on line, and do the sitting back. But both are mistaken. Site promotion consists of a variety of different elements, which, as much as possible, you should have going all the time. Here's how to get an effective strategy started ...
This has to be your top priority. We can write a whole book on this subject but the key areas to look at are link popularity, keyword density and regular updates.
From more information on link popularity, see reciprocal links, below.
This ties in closely with link popularity. Asking web sites which COMPLIMENT your own to link to your site and in turn linking to theirs will greatly increase the traffic to your site. Not only does it improve your search engine ranking (the more incoming links you have the better) but you can also benefit from traffic from the other site.
This is a very overlooked way to generate lots of traffic. You simply write an article on a related subject to your website. Include a resource box at the end of the article, which contains a link to your website. Then send your article to EVERYONE. Local newspapers, magazines, clients, online ezines etc. Not only do you benefit from the increase in traffic to your web site, but you also become an immediate expert on the subject (according to your readers).
You should include a signature file on any e-mails that you send out. This is basically a short paragraph at the end of your e-mails that includes your name, e-mail address and a link to your website.
You can also include this signature on the bottom of any posts that you make on forums or online message boards.
Viral marketing is basically word of mouth promotion. Lets say someone visits your site, thinks it's cool and tells one of their friends about it. That friend looks, also thinks its cool and tells a couple more friends about it and so forth. Viral marketing gets its name by the way the information is spread exponentially like a virus.
There are lots of ways to virally market a website. The simplest method being a Tell a Friend page that sends an e-mail to an address you enter. Rewarding people for recommending a friend is a great way to get people to sign up.
Finally, offering people something for free (be it regular advice or a discount on your products) is a great way to generate traffic to your web site and keep them returning.
Don't just rely on one technique to promote your site or you'll end up disappointed, but keep a steady flow of all these strategies and you'll notice the difference in just a few weeks!
Very useful Seth!
posted by Richard Althorp | 31.05.07 @ 21:57
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