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Effective Ways to Promote Your Website
Promoting your website can be a daunting task: it feels like
there are thousands of ways to do it, but all of them take a lot
of time or money for no guaranteed return. To help solve this
problem, I've compiled a list of ten easy ways to promote your
website.
We'll begin with the assumption that your site is brand new and
that you haven't done any website promotion work yet. However,
that doesn't mean that you can't use this information if you
have submitted to a few search engines or registered your site
with a couple of directories. If you notice that there are some
things you have already done, feel free to simply skip over them.
1. Advertise in the Media. Now, you might have already ruled out
advertising in newspapers and the like as too expensive,
especially since the chances are your audience doesn't live in
any specific local area. That mostly rules out radio, too, and
TV is even more likely to be out of your reach. What you might
not have realised, though, is that you should stop looking at
the general media and start looking at the specialist media for
your area. For example, if you run a house-buying website, you
could advertise it in specialist property magazines, and even on
'lifestyle' cable channels that show programmes about moving
home.
2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If your business has any
physical objects, whether it's a product, a carrier bag or just
the front of your office, make sure to write your web address on
there. Even if people don't keep or remember the exact address,
it at least lets them know that your website exists.
3. Give Out Leaflets. There's nothing wrong with a bit of
old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can.
The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific
demographic rather than an area, but the post office will be
surprisingly helpful when it comes to getting your leaflets
where they need to go, if you ask them.
4. Go to Specialist Events. If there's some kind of trade fair
for the industry your website is in, turn up to it and promote
your website. While there might not be all that many people
there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get
your site talked about.
5. Put it on Business Cards. It should go without saying, but
once you've gone to all that trouble to set up a website, don't
forget to put
it on your business cards. After all, if you're
relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them
the option of reading more about you on your website?
6. Astroturf on Forums. An often overlooked way of getting
traffic to your website is to participate on forums related to
the subject and put your web address in your signature. This
gets you more traffic than you'd think, especially at very
popular forums.
7. Create Controversy. A great trick to promote your website is
to use it to say controversial things: as the saying goes, any
publicity is good publicity. This works best if you say
something that you know will be provocative to a certain kind of
person, getting it linked from all over the place. Bear in mind,
though, that this strategy is better for advertising-driven
websites than it is if you're trying to build a reputation and
make sales directly.
8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more businesses are starting
blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you're using your blog
to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it's
useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, 'views not news'
- make sure your blog has something interesting to say.
9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem to think it's some
kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising can
work very well, especially with keywords that aren't already
cluttered with ads. If you do it right, you can get very
targeted ads very cheap - indeed, ironically, the more targeted
the ads, the cheaper they tend to be.
10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally, if you're selling
something, don't forget that old standby of web marketing: the
affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they
can sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you've got a
crack sales team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan
is that everyone is doing it, so you'll need to offer a high
percentage of your profits to your affiliates to make the offer
attractive to them.
About the author:
Original Source: Articles
Galore.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
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