Website Promotion Tips

So you just built your prize website. You put weeks of work into making the best site possible. Everything is perfect.

Now you wonder, why is nobody coming to your site? The answer is simple: You Must PROMOTE!! Promote everyday, every week, every god given hour... and then promote some more.

There are loads of ways to promote your website that will cost you nothing. Here are some of the best ways that I have found.

• Link Exchanges
• Message Boards
• Publish an Ezine
• Search Engines
• Announcement Lists

Link Exchanges
Set up a link exchange page on your site and then find sites that share the same interest or "theme" of your site. Email the webmasters of these sites and explain why you want to do a link exchange. Tell them a little about your site and invite them to take a look around it. But be selective about which sites you put your link on as the quality of the other sites can bring un wanted visitors (or the wrong crowd) to your site. In 90% of cases the webmaster will be willing to exchange links, so give it a go!

Message Boards
Get involved in message boards or forums. Don't just post a single ad and then never come back to it. Ask questions, answer questions, generally just interact with your visitors. Many people have had alot of success with this method.

Publish an Ezine
If you are serious about your business you should definitely produce an ezine. You want to provide quality information as well as updates and information on your site. This will be one way to gather emails and keep your potential customers coming back.

Tip: Never sell your visitors/customers email to another company as they will not be best pleased with you and you can kiss that customer and all the people they know goodbye!!!

Search Engines
You should manually submit to the top search engines and never use the programs and companies on the internet. You should also get listed in the minor engines and any directories you can find on other sites. Get listed in as many places as you can (except possibly Free For All pages). I prefer not to place my ad on some of these FFA pages. Here are the top search engines:

• Yahoo - http://www.yahoo.com
• Hotbot - http://www.hotbot.com
• Alta Vista - http://www.altavista.com
• Excite - http://www.excite.com
• Lycos - http://www.lycos.com
• Google - http://www.google.com
• Infoseek - http://infoseek.go.com
• Northern Light - http://www.northernlight.com
• WebCrawler - http://www.webcrawler.com
• Splut - http://www.splut.com

Announcement Lists
There are hundreds and hundreds of announcement lists where you can announce your website, ezine or business opportunity. Make sure you follow the rules for Submiting your ads to each list though as you could be banned. You can find some of these lists at:

• http://www.egroups.com
• http://www.globelists.com
• http://www.milomail.com

When you have a website or ezine, you have to spend a lot of time promoting. As you promote, you will learn more about the different ways you can do this on the internet. You must keep at it and do not give up when things look bad. It takes time to get your business established online. Doing these things I have listed will help you spread the word! The only thing that l ever regret is not starting and mailing list/ezine when l first established my website as it has brought to my site more hits than some of the search engines alone!

So, it takes time but it's worth it in the end... trust me!!! :)

Written By Luke Humble - Web Designer / Flash Animator {http://www.boritech.com}