Simple free ways of promoting your websites!
When you have just finished your brand new website i can
imagine you would want the whole world to visit it, and
preferably keep on coming back for more. If you have money to do
some investing in advertisement in any way you have it
considerably easier in those first steps then the web master
without that cold hard cash backup. But don't fear if you are
not in that money group yet, you don't need money for
everything. It can of course make life a bit easier, but what
isn't there isn't there and the site still needs to be made
popular.
2. A Good First Step
A good first step to undertake would be visiting a big search
engine and enter a keyword you feel is extremely related to your
website. Then write down the first 10 websites you feel are very
related to your content and that have a list of partner links
displayed on their website. If a website doesn't have list with
partner links you have no real chance of getting your link to be
displayed, so you can ignore them. So after you found some
websites your next step should be contacting the web masters of
each one of those websites. Before you contact a web master you
make sure you have setup a link on your website pointing to
their website, then you contact them in a very friendly manner
(not too overly business like) and ask them if they would be
interested in displaying a text link or perhaps even a banner to
your website. Because you already have a link pointing to them
they can see you are serious and perhaps they will place your
link too. You have a good chance of being accepted as long as
you stay friendly. If you repeat these steps and contact a lot
more websites your website will be know much better, and the
best thing is that its free. Of course it needs time, but you
will definitely feel the impact in the number of visitors. This
is especially true if you have a very popular topic and are
offering useful content, they will be coming back for more and
more.
3. Find Those Quality Directories
The next thing you should do is find free link-directories
related to your website and submit your site to be included.
Just use a search engine and start to search for link
directories. Be very sure that you don't use all the FFA (free
for all) directories you find because a lot of them are just
junk and rather then being good for your site they will hurt it.
Look out for the quality directories amongst them, especially
serving categories related to the topics of your website.
Submitting your website to those quality directories will drive
lots of traffic to your site, again all free and even reasonably
targeted. The traffic is targeted because if somebody was
searching a category in a link-directory, and found your site,
it meant he/she was already searching for topics related to your
site and thus perhaps is an important customer for your website
in the future. Like i said be a bit careful with this step and
select only quality directories. Also resubmit your site from
time to time if you think you aren't included anymore.
4. Bring On That Signature
Another great free method that is guaranteed to work is
register at a lot of forums all over the Internet. Of course
again make sure you only join forums that are related to the
content on your site as much as possible. When you find a forum,
you should join it and firstly post an introduction message
describing who you are, what you do and what kind of website you
own. Every forum will have a special part for introduction's and
you will be amazed by the nice reactions people will give you
and how many of them will actually visit your site immediately
to know more about you. The next important and most useful step
is finding the that forum's control panel where you can set your
signature. A signature is a small piece of text usually about
2-5 lines, which you can fill and which is attached to every
post you make or have made in the past. If you place a link to
your site in this signature, it means that with every post you
make you make sure that:
1)People that read that thread will read your post and
perhaps visit your site.
2)Your link is added to that website and search engines
notice it for sure.
It is not at all weird to see loads of visitors coming in
though all the forums you register and actively post at. Even if
you registered at a forum years ago, go back and setup that
signature, you can't miss out on all those links pointing to
your site. This type of promotion is fun because you can
actively join a community with a topic you love, discuss it,
meet people and all the time you are promoting your site, on the
other hand it also takes time and dedication. The best thing
again its all free and thus if you are serious about promoting
your site but don't have the cash to back that up, this is a
great way to start generating some good traffic.
4. Write That Article
The next thing you might do, but this is not for everybody, is
writing articles and submit them to free article directories.
This again requires time and some skill, but is worth every
minute of it. In every article you write you can place links
back to your site in the "about the author" part. If you are
good at writing articles, the web master that searches for free
articles will add your articles to their websites and thus you
have more and more links pointing directly to your website.
Because you are not pointing a link back to their site (like in
the first step) it even means that the link is seen by search
engines as a even more important link.(A site wouldn't link to
you for any reason, you must be doing something good.) By
submitting your articles to the many directories out there you
will increase the chance of getting more targeted traffic a lot,
and all for free again.
5. Setup RSS Feeds
One last thing i would like to notice is that you could have a
look at ways to create RSS feeds for your content. If you aren't
a developer yourself i would let this option go for now and
return back when you have the money to let somebody develop
feeds for you. No need to break your head over just another
thing. RSS is a way to deliver you content from your website to
the desktop of a user. If a user downloads you feed he can enter
it in his feed reading application and every time you add new
content to your site he/she will be notified immediately on
their desktop. On top of this you can also submit all your RSS
feeds to RSS feed directories, just like you would submit your
site to quality link directories.
6. Conclusion
Well i hope i could show you some free website promotion tricks
in this article, just remember its very important to give it all
time. Don't expect overnight delivery because you will be
disappointed for sure. But if you do give it time and you also
take time to apply some of the described tricks over and over
again ( like posting in the forums) i can guarantee you will see
an increase in visitors which can mean an increase in profit.
If you want to display this article you have to include the
information about the author and a clear link to
http://www.free-webmaster-resource.com must be visible. You also
can not re-write the article without permission. I would love to
know where my articles are being displayed so dont be shy to
send me an email if you want to display an article.
About the author:
Erwin Schiphouwer (PrimeVector) owns a web development company
in the Netherlands called PrimeVector. He also created and runs
http://www.primevector.nl, a growing resource for web masters,
web designers and developers from all around the world. Visit
www.PrimeVector.nl today and find more unique tutorials,
articles, experiments, links, polls and more. Thanks for
reading!