Promoting Your Website

It’s amazing that most people who set up their first website still seem to think that the old saying “Build it and they will come” still applies. After creating their web pages, they sit back and wait for the money to come rolling in.

Believe me, if you make a website and then sit back and do nothing, the only visitors you will get to your site will be virtual dust and virtual tumbleweed!

The only way you will get visitors is to promote it. This means getting links to it in the search engines and other sites. Here’s a list of things you could try – or rather, things you should try. If you’re serious about promoting your site, you need to use every method available to you.

Blogging

Blogs get indexed by the search engines very quickly. If you have a hosting account, consider installing a WordPress blog on your site. A standard installation of WordPress is set up to “Ping” your posts to a number of blog directories.
Alternatively, a Blogger blog is a good bet. Blogger is owned by Google which indexes them frequently. I have seen a new Blogger blog appear in Google within an hour.

Article Marketing

Article Marketing is basically the submission of articles to any one of hundreds of article sites. The articles discuss topics related to the author’s website and then links to the website. Article Content King is an excellent choice. Articles get indexed quickly, and you can actually earn a share in their advertising revenue.
A great advantage of article sites is that many other sites and blogs syndicate good quality articles from them, which means your article could appear on many more sites.

Search Engine Submission

New websites can be submitted directly to the search engines. However, it can take some time before your site is indexed if you do it this way, so it can actually be slower than other methods.

Directory Submission

There are numerous website directories which publish categorised lists of sites. Submit your site to as many of these as possible to build up a collection of good quality links to your site. This will not only help your site to appear in the search engines, but the number of links will improve its position in the search engine results pages.

Forum Submissions

Join forums which are related to your website. Read as many posts as you can to get a “feel” for the forum before contributing your own posts. Add links to your site in the Signature of your posts, but don’t fill your post body text with links – you will be considered a spam poster. Links in your signature are totally acceptable, however, but don’t overdo it.

Blog Comments

Find blogs related to the subject of your site and comment on posts made. Most blogs let you add your website URL to your comment. Whatever you do though, post useful, genuine comments. If you write something generic or inane such as “I found your post interesting and look forward to reading more”, it may be rejected by the blog owner, or even caught by the blog’s spam filter.

Submission Services

If the above sounds like a lot of work, you’re right. Running an online business isn’t the gravy train that most people think it is. You have to work at it to achieve success. Thankfully, if there’s a job to be done, there’s usually somebody who will do it for you for a fee.
Submission services can submit your site to over a thousand website directories for just a few cents per submission. The submission service that I recommend is such as Directory Maximizer. They submit your site by hand to ensure that your site will appear in the correct category in the directory. As a result, you will gain a large number of strong, permanent backlinks to your site. These backlinks will help to push your site up the ranks on the search engine results pages.

Using a submission service such as this will save you a LOT of time. What is your time worth per hour? $10? $20? $40? More? How many hours would it take to submit your site to over 1000 directories, bearing in mind that you would probably need to register at all the sites first? Using a good quality submission service is a no-brainer.

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