How to Promote Your Website

Creating a successful Internet presence involves much more than designing a great web site or having the “perfect” product.

Listing your web site with the Search Engines is your first step; however, you must not solely rely on the Search Engines to bring all your website traffic.You must design a complete promotional strategy and work it every day. If you’re launching a new web site, your first step will be to submit your site to the Search Engines and Directories.

Although there are many auto-submission software programs available on the Internet, make sure you manually submit your site to the main Search Engines and Directories:

Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html (Although you can submit your site map to Google, you will receive a higher ranking by allowing their robots to find your pages on their own.)

Once you’ve manually submitted your main pages, visit SelfPromotion.com http://www.selfpromotion.com to automatically submit your pages to a number of additional Search Engines and Directories.

A good way to organize your promotions is to set up a web page, for your personal use, that will contain your complete strategy. This page should be stored on your hard drive and not uploaded to your server. Your page should contain four sections.

  1. Daily Promotions
  2. Weekly Promotions
  3. Monthly Promotions
  4. Miscellaneous Promotions

Each of these four sections should contain the appropriate information for each of your promotional resources, such as web site name, user ID, password (if applicable) and hyperlinked web addresses for each web site you plan to use for your web promotions. This will enable you to open your web page each day and visit the sites you have listed.

Daily Web Promotions – Discussion Boards
Visit some popular discussion boards and share your expertise. Although you may not advertise on discussion boards, you can include your signature file with your post. Before you begin posting to discussion boards, make sure you lurk a while and see exactly how the board functions.

Visit http://www.web-source.net/web/Discussion_Forums/ for a complete listing of some of the top discussion boards.

Weekly Promotions
Ezine Advertising / Ad SwapsYour weekly promotions should consist of placing a paid e-zine advertisement and/or arranging ad swaps with fellow publishers.

Visit the Directory of Ezines for a complete listing of hundreds of publishers and contact information for advertising. http://www.web-source.net/cgi-bin/t.cgi?l=doe

To organize your ad placements and swaps, place the publication names, publisher names, ad dates and hyperlinked web addresses within your weekly promotions list.

Monthly Web Site Promotion
Your monthly promotions should include writing an article in the area of your expertise, promotional exchanges with similar web sites, and offline promotions.To organize your monthly promotions, place the names and hyperlinked web addresses for each of your promotional resources within your monthly promotions section.

 

Shelley Lowery is the author of the acclaimed web design series, web design Mastery, an in depth guide to professional web design that is rapidly becoming the beginner course for professional web design. Just go here to learn more …http://www.webmastercourse.com/blog/go/webmastery/

Hope these tips will help you to promote your website and drive more traffic to your pages.