Website Promotion

Website Promotion is all about telling people about your website.

The most common way that visitors find your website is through the search engines. However search engines aren't the only possible source of traffic.

It is important to ensure that you don't become totally dependent on single traffic source as it can have devastating effects if you lose it.

So although not all forms of promotion may be appropriate for your business/website it is important that you should familiarise yourself with the various alternatives.

Here is a quick guide to the online Website promotion options that will help you decide which ones are best for you:

1. Search Engines
2. PPC (Pay Per Click)
3. Article Promotion
4. Feeder Sites
5. Blogging
6. RSS feeds
7. Email Marketing -Newsletters and Newsletter/Ezine advertising
8. Link Exchange
9. Banner advertising

Website Promotion Using Search Engines

This is by far the most popular, and for most webmasters usually the only form of promotion that they do. It is ideally suited for medium to large content sites but can also be used on mini-websites depending on the theme chosen.

Getting search engine traffic requires that your website and web pages are optimised for the search engines (see a guide to web page optimization for help). Although this may sound difficult it is in fact relatively straightforward and just requires that you follow some basic guidelines when making your web pages.

Search engine traffic is probably the most difficult to get, but is the most desirable as it is free . Search engine traffic does take time to build and for a new website you can expect to wait anywhere from 2-6 months.

For help see starting with search engines.

Website Promotion using PPC (pay per Click)

PPC traffic costs you money. It is however easy to get and provided you are willing to pay the price. It is an excellent source of traffic especially for a new website, and for testing a website idea.

Pay Per Click isn't new; companies like Overture pioneered this area. Google Adwords are relatively new and combine the traditional free search feature and the pay per click model into a single search system.

Google Adwords are easier to use then the other PPC systems and are my preferred choice.  Both yahoo and Microsoft also offer alternatives to Google Adsense/Adwords .

Article Promotion

This is only viable if your website theme lends itself to writing articles. If it isn't then you have to be a little more creative and use similar/related themes for your articles.

The idea  is to submit the articles them to article directories, and they will in turn distribute them to other websites/newletters. People who read the articles may be interested to follow your resource link to your website.

The Article Marketing section has more details that will help.

Feeder Sites

Own Sites

This is a popular technique regardless of your website type. You use other sites that you own and link them to your  website. This can be an extremely effective technique when the themes are closely related.

As an example if you had an existing site that dealt with wireless networks you could very easily link it to a site offering other technical items.

Directories

Directories are very powerful way of getting good incoming links and targeted traffic. See Directories Versus Search Engines for more detail.

Newsletters / Ezines

There are too main areas of newsletter or ezine promotion:

1. Have your own ezine or newsletter
2. Advertise in other peoples newsletters

Your own Newsletter

Newsletter/Ezines or electronic magazines are email newsletters similar to the familiar paper bases ones. Newsletters are an ideal way of building a loyal potential customer base.

Because Newsletters are  focused on a particular area your ad can be targeted at the needs of those readers.

Autoresponders are typically used to deliver  newsletters and  provide the email capture facility. See A guide to Autoresponders for help on email marketing .

Advertise in other Peoples' Newsletters

Because I don't try to sell any particular product I don't use this form of traffic generation, if you would like more detail then I suggest you visit http://www.ezinehub.com

RSS Feeds

RSS is relatively new and only really popular among the savvy Internet users. It relies on people having  special newsreader software installed. The next release of Internet explorer will have it built in and you can expect RSS to become more popular when it is released. See RSS feeds for more details.

Blogging

A website blog can be used has a promotional tool as well as serving as a website in its own right. The blogging section has more details.

Link Exchange

Link exchange is a promotional strategy and a search engine strategy as search engines use incoming links as one of their ranking criteria see building website links for more details.

Banner Advertising

Here you pay a website owner to host a banner advertising your website. Rates vary considerably, and as I don't use this form of advertising I won't comment any further on it.

Do you Need to Promote Your Website?

At a minimum you should always submit your website to the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN). This is free and easy to do. Whether you do anymore than that depends on what you want to do with the website.

 If the purpose of the website is to bring in new clients/sell more products then you need to actively promote your website.

 If the website serves more of a brochure /prospectus role i.e. you can advertise offline and just refer you clients to the website for more details instead of sending them a brochure.

 In this case you probably don't need any more promotion than what you are currently doing.