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Promoting Your new
Site
How can I get people to start
visiting my brand new site? How do I get traffic right away?
If you are anything like me, you
want people to find your new website immediately. If you have
an older, existing site and you just added a whole new section or
product line, you want everyone to know right now. Let's get
some traffic! Let's get some page hits today! I want to
be number one in the search results right now!
Of course, being impatient does
not make anything happen any faster. I've tried it when
driving, and it doesn't work. I've tried it on the Internet
and it gets about the same results. Some things take a little
time.
You can get new web traffic in
one day, of course. You can get lots of hits, lots of
visitors, and still not have the results you want. If you want
to attract visitors who will truly appreciate your site and its
content, then you need to make sure you tell the right people.
And you want to be careful that you tell the truth or you will
suffer the consequences.
Spamming via email, comments,
forum posts, etc. will almost never work. Even when you are
not spamming, it may be viewed as such by some, so be careful not to
try to communicate the wrong way.
Email spam is the biggest
offender by far. There is so much garbage out there flying
around, that many people today refuse to read anything that is not
from a personal friend or associate. I'm one of those people.
I don't even read a lot of the email that really comes from someone
I know. I give messages attention based on importance and
value. If a message is a forward, for example, I seldom even
look at it. If it is a cry for help, on the other hand, then I
may simply pick up the phone and call.
Email should never be used to
promote a new site unless you are sending it to people who have
specifically asked you for such information. Reading email
takes time, and time is precious for most of us. Wild claims
are made every day by ignorant people with more greed than common
sense, and most email recipients simply draw the line on anything
unfamiliar and unwanted.
The same goes for comments in
forums, newsgroups, discussion lists, blogs, and so on. Even
new posts to the above should be reserved for information that most
of the users really want to receive. It may be fine to
occasionally let everyone know what you're doing when you start a
new site, but if that is all you ever have to say, then you can be
sure no one is reading your posts.
So how do you tell the world the
wonderful news about your new site? You must pay the piper.
If you have other websites, they can be useful to at least start the
ball rolling in providing links to a new site. If you have
friends with websites, you can ask them to place a link to your new
site. If you know of directories geared to the same topic or a
related topic as your site, be sure to submit your new site.
There are many thousands of
sites that might be helpful in promoting your new venture.
There are local news boards, special interest forums, bulletin
boards, and many business sites that may be very interested in
linking to your new site, so take the time to find as many of these
as you can. it takes time, but the work is always worth it,
even when it seems to take forever (and it often does seem to do
just that).
Paid Advertising: the
Good, the Bad, and Which is Which?
There is always paid
advertising. AdWords (Google), Search Marketing (Yahoo), and
the Microsoft adCenter are only three among many large corporations
that will sell you an ad in a network of websites and search
results. And then there are other individual sites and many
smaller advertising and site promotion companies that will promise
to put you on top in no time. All you have to do is give them
money.
I know of businesses that have
enjoyed success with such ad campaigns. But I do not use any
of them. If I am going to pay for an ad (and I sometimes do),
it will be on a carefully chosen site, or even more likely in a
print publication. That's right, I said a print publication,
such as a newspaper or magazine.
Here's the thing: An online ad
is only good while you are paying for it. I know of one
business that has enjoyed many thousands of dollars in sales as a
direct result of AdWords advertising. But the gentleman who
pays for those ads told me how much he had to pay each month to get
those sales. Let's just say that the profit margin was not
what he really wanted it to be.
His second complaint? He
said that Google could not give him a record of the people who
clicked through to reach his website. I asked if his own
personnel had kept a record of the sales, since they had to collect
payment for the Internet orders and then ship the products out.
They had not kept specific records of the orders coming through the
website. But of course that was fairly easy to fix.
The main problem he really had
was the immediate loss of Internet business when or if he decided to
stop the Adwords campaign. If no one sees the ad when they
start an online search, then they probably won't find the website.
At least that's how it was when I first took a look at the business
and the website. I was able to change that some by showing
this businessman the changes he needed to make on the website.
He made the changes and his site suddenly appeared on the first
pages of search results for his product lines.
But what about advertising?
Why do I believe that print ads are better than online ads
Stop and give it a little thought. A newspaper or magazine ad
in the right publication can remain useful for months and even years
after the ad is purchased. Even a small weekly newspaper tends
to hang around for at least a week, if not longer. The ads in
that paper are still working. If the newspaper or magazine
also places print ads online, as many do, then you have the best of
both worlds.
Obviously, arguments can be made
for both sides. Online ads are online, where the people using
their computers are, and if they are already online, they can simply
click over to your site, and you have instant results. Or nearly so.
With print, though, you don't need to keep bidding higher and higher
on key words and ad position until you are paying more than you
should for the traffic you want to see right now. You just
wait until the ad comes out and then begin to see the results you
paid for.
Site Promotion, in a
Nutshell
Making lots of fiends on the
Internet is one of the very best ways to get a foothold on decent
traffic. Producing good content that is meaningful to a
specific group of people is another way to bring in good traffic.
Making a website that functions well, so far as being able to easily
navigate the site, is helpful, both in search engine rankings and in
actual visitor traffic. Building sites with good page names
and titles, good descriptions, meaningful keywords will also a very
good idea. Keeping your website up to date, not only with
active links but also with currently accurate content, helps bring
people back.
There is no magic involved, no
rocket science required to make a site known and popular to both
search engines and to human beings. If people want what you
have, if they know how to find you (or can find out quickly using
common search terms), and if they are impressed enough with your
site to tell their friends and build links to your pages, then your
new site will enjoy a long and happy success.
Jim Sutton
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