In the digital world, creating a website is only the first step. The real challenge lies in making your website known to the world. This article provides a detailed guide on how to effectively promote your website and ensure a steady flow of traffic.
After months of hard work, you've finally launched your website. You might think that the hard part is over and that traffic will start flowing in automatically. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. The reality is, apart from you and your web host, no one knows your website exists. The real work begins now - promoting your website and making its presence known.
Promoting your website is a continuous process that requires a well-thought-out plan and strategy. The first step is to do your initial submission work. Once that's done, you need to have a systematic, organized method of ensuring your site continues to draw traffic.
Before you start promoting your website, create a Promotion Toolkit. This should be a text file containing a list of all your webpages, along with columns for the Engine/Directory Submitted To, Date Last Submitted, and Next Submission Date.
In the same file, create descriptions of varying lengths for your site. These descriptions will be invaluable when submitting your site to search engines, directories, and announcement lists.
The initial submission work involves two major tasks: submitting your site to the major search engines and listing it with all the online directories you can find.
The first task after creating your Promotion Toolkit is to submit your site to all the major search engines. These include Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light, Web Crawler, and Yahoo.
In addition to search engines, there are hundreds of directories where you should list your site. A great resource for this is Virtual Promote, which provides links to virtually every promotion point on the web today.
After taking care of your initial submission work, you need to focus on ongoing promotion strategies to keep traffic flowing to your site.
Creating an ezine is one of the most important things you can do for the long-term viability of your website. A great resource to help you get started is EzineZ.com.
Writing articles for your ezine and submitting them to various article databases is an effective way of generating traffic to your website. Some good starting points for article submissions include Idea Marketers, Ezine Articles, Find Your Dream, and Media Peak.
Doorway pages are webpages you create with a specific search engine's algorithms in mind. However, be aware that some search engines penalize for this practice. To stay current with various search engines' preferences, bookmark Search Engine Watch.
Your promotional strategy should also include paid advertising in ezines. If you also publish your own ezine, consider doing ad swaps with other ezine publishers.
Opinion is divided on the effectiveness of placing ads at free classified sites. Some popular sites include Yahoo Classifieds, Adland Pro, and Web Sitings.
Give your site visitors and ezine subscribers a way to recommend your site and ezine to others. A good tool for this is Recommend It.
Update your website content frequently to give visitors something to come back for.
Consider bidding on keywords to improve your ranking on search engines like GoTo.com.
Contact webmasters of complementary but not competitive sites and ask if they will swap links with you.
Participate in discussion boards, newsgroups, and mailing lists relevant to the subject matter of your site.
Enter into joint ventures with other websites and/or ezines.
Use press release services like Canada One and Gebbie Press to promote your website.
Promoting your website is a continuous process that requires planning, diligence, and application. By getting the foundation right and constantly promoting it, you stand a good chance of making your online business a success.
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