If You Want To REALLY Promote Your Site, Here's How...
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. Don't
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.
Don't 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. Don't Waste Your Visitors
Every visitor that comes to your site is hard-earned - so don't
'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 doesn't 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 won't 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, let's 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, I've 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.
About the author:
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: http://www.submityourarticle.com