Examples of Site Promotion Techniques

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There’s a plethora of ways you can promote your web site, and many of them are inexpensive or free. I picked this short list of ten to illustrate how they often overlap and can help you in more than one area.

1. Search Engine Optimization/Marketing

   You probably already know how this works. You set up your site with both the search engines and the visitors they bring you in mind. Instead of targeting general terms, you laser in on what will get you the most lucrative results, get good links back to your site, optimize your title tags and images, let Google, Yahoo and MSN know how to find you, etc.

   Done properly, this can send you hundreds or even thousands of visitors every month. However, the state of search engines is always in flux. You could do everything right today and have your efforts nullified with a slight change in algoritms if you rely on this method alone to bring you the results you desire.

2. Strategic Linking

   Yes, it’s one of the best ways to get you higher rankings – as I’ve frequently referenced throughout my blog, sites such as Monster.com seem to defy every other search engine rule of thumb, yet survive every search engine update purely on the strength of having effective links back to their sites.

   It’s not just about reciprocal links either. Those can help but they aren’t effective as they once were. Organic links to your site, using your chosen anchor text, can boost your traffic not just from those following the links, but through being spidered and followed back to your site by the search engine spiders.

3. Blogging

   Everyone and their mother’s dog is talking to you about blogging, saying that you should start one up, that it’s the best way in the last couple of years that you can get fast and effective links pointing to your site.

   They’re not wrong. If you don’t have a blog, you’re missing out on targeted traffic, a wonderful communication tool, 40-100 easy links back to your site using your targeted text, and dozens of other benefits.

   Even if you weren’t able to establish dialogue with your site audience right away, the targeted linking you can get from having a properly promoted blog can get you absolutely suberb search engine placement. It’s not just poor man’s SEO solution anymore – if you’re setting up your blog correctly, it’s everyman’s SEO solution.

   You don’t even have to write long article-length posts every few days like I’m prone to doing. You’ll find that a few paragraphs a day will do – in most blog systems you could even write them in advance as you would an auto-responder series.

4. Using RSS to Increase Traffic

   Blogging is a great solution, but it still takes writing. If you’re not as much of a writer, and you don’t want to hire a consultant or ghost writer to translate your thoughts to a readable format, you also have the option of creating an RSS feed that tracks the most up-to-date content at your site.

   You’ll also have the opportunity to get links back to your site and increase your visibility in the search engines using this technique. It’s not as effective when not coupled with blogging, however, it can still lend itself to site promotion with less effort.

   And the combination of links and fresh content helps your search engine results.

   If you’re blogging, don’t forget to turn that site feed on — and promote it!

5. Building a Subscriber List

   Most of my traffic is return traffic – some 70 – 80% of the people who come to my site like the content and keep coming back. Since only a small percentage of visitors buy on their first visit, this definitely helps increase the number of sales of your products.

   Whether you have a list of previous buyers who have opted in for updates, potential buyers who have opted-in for information, or both, the list you build online is worth it’s e-weight in e-gold to your online business.

   You just have to remember to keep building your list, and keep using it, giving them enough information to keep them returning, but not so much that they start to believe this is all your site has to offer.

   With RSS, some site owners have given up on email as a way to deliver their information. This is a mistake – email may be declining as a way to deliver marketing messages, but your opt-in subscriber base is still important to your business. Not everyone has converted over to RSS yet.

   So be sure that those who join your email list are double opt-in, and give them the option of following you via feed if they so choose.

6. Press Releases

   One of the most neglected areas of site promotion online is the press release venue. You may try and fail a number of times, even as a seasoned marketer, to get your message delivered via a press release. But there are resources out there to help keep you from making the most typical errors. Not to mention that press releases can get you links back from Yahoo or Google News, where prospect in your market may be following your content.

   And getting just one media news source to write about you as a result of a press release is worth all the effort.

7. Podcast Marketing

   Podcasting is not the Holy Grail of marketing any more than blogs or RSS are alone. But combined with the rest of your proper site promotion arsenal, they often provide you with exposure in areas that you may have never thought you could enter.

   People who are following the relatively new area of online business talk shows and mini-broadcasts are often following the cutting edge of the area you’re talking about. Some of these people will spread the word about you. Others will become clients faster, after hearing that you seem to know what you’re talking about.

   And of course, there is the fact that by being a podcaster, you can submit links around ten directories in niches that aren’t presently being filled, and come up in custom searches from search engines like Alta Vista’s audio search and Yahoo’s media searches.

8. Advertising

   No, this isn’t strictly promotion, but the added boost of advertising your free newsletter, a special report you’ve written, or simply an announcement of your site’s gratis resources can get you a flood of new prospects.

   Some online advertising is archived indefinitely. More links that you control.

9. Joint Ventures

   Hooking up with another authority in your area of expertise or a complementary one is as old as business itself. The internet is not the birthplace of the joint venture – pizza places and video stores develop relationships to sell more of each others products than they might alone. And I’m sure you remember magazine subscription offers that offer a free alarm clock radio with their offer.

   These joint deals, particularly when targeted, can expose you to a network that is bigger or more targeted than the one you presently have. Returning the favor enhances your reputation as a fair business person.

10. Article Marketing

    This is one that I’ve talked about since the beginning of my successful online time. I won’t rehash all the benefits you can get from spreading a little of your knowledge around the net or illustrate how your targeted links can get you better clickers, who are in the market for you offer. Jim Edward’s video, which you can access below in the resource section, says it better than I ever could.

    What I will say is this: it doesn’t hurt your DIY SEO efforts to have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of links to your site.

So now you can begin to see how all of this works together to build you a strong base of prospective clients. Just blogging, just RSS, just podcasting or just SEM/SEO can bring you some results. And alone, some of those results will be fantastic.

For a while.

But for the long range view, what you really want is an well rounded plan for web site promotion. Start with one or two methods, master them, get it on auto-pilot as much as you can, then add another.

You can have a trickle of traffic that might end with one tiny change to the remote resource – or you can have dozens of tributaries that add up to a steady stream of continuous traffic. It’s up to you.

Resources :: Read Part One of this article :: Part Two :: The Collection of Free Traffic Tips :: Increase Traffic with RSS :: Promote Your Blog and Get More Traffic :: What to Blog About :: Strategic Blog Timing Gets You In Google Faster :: Get All These Resources and More :: Learn to Why to Write Articles from this Video