Thursday, December 18, 2008

Top Tactics To Promote Your Website

By Stewart Woyo

For weeks you've slaved over your new website. You spent time organizing the text, cropping amazing photography, building the perfect graphics and finally it's time for you new website to go live. A website this good will have traffic beyond your greatest expectations, just as soon as you submit it to the search engines, right? But, after a few days go buy you just aren't getting the traffic you expected. So you submit it to hundreds of directories. That should do the trick. A few weeks pass and still very few viewers are finding your site. Maybe just submitting your site to search engines and directories just isn't enough? It's not. What you need is a well planed strategy to promote you site.

Web site promotion methods are as varied as the online sites they promote. Each of them, used properly, can increase traffic to your site dramatically. In the interests of keeping this article short and sweet, I'll give you five to get you started.

1) "Move the free line," is a phrase for a popular website promotion tactic. Offering a sample or service for free is a proven method of generating increased traffic to your site. Be sure that your company's information is included on your sample. In this manner, visitors who love your sample will constantly be reminded of where they got it, and be able to come back to your website again. Give the visitor something of value for free, and include a call to action.

2) If you are willing to spend money to make money, paying for traffic is a quick way to send visitors to your website. This also allows you to see if your website actually converts. Pay per click search engines and networks allow you to target visitors. With these, you only pay for visitors that actually land on your site. This very effective promotion method is best used if you have a specific targeted audience for your traffic.

3) Networking is probably the most cost-efficient way to send a lot of web traffic to your new site. Meeting and developing relationships with other marketers is a sure-fire way to send a bunch of free web traffic to your site, and may bring in valuable revenue. If you can arrange it correctly, forming a partnership with another business with a similar target market is a great way to swap buyer traffic. This is probably the best way to increase not only web traffic, but also revenue.

4) Content is king! Think about the sites you visit most often. They could be news sites, or weather sites. Maybe a site related to one of your hobbies. Why do you visit them often? Because each time you visit you read or see something new. Your content doesn't have to live on your website alone. Write articles and submit them to other websites and directories. Make sure they always reference, or better yet link back to your site. The person that was interested in your article will most likely be interested in your site. Before you know it you'll have created an endless stream of web viewers. Plus, as long as you update your contentthey'll keep coming back.

5) Studies have shown that video is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website. Video has become a mainstay of the internet culture. The more video content you have, the better. Publish videos to your website, and then submit them to free web video sites like Youtube or Google Video. Every time one of your videos is viewed you'll improve your search engine rankings. Better search engine rankings mean more traffic. Without visitors your website is invisible to the world. - 16069

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