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If You Want to Really Promote Your Site, Here's How...
by Steve Shaw
Published on this site: January 30th, 2006 - See
more articles from this month
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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
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