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If You Want To REALLY Promote Your Site, Here's How...
By Steve Shaw (c) 2006

Site promotion gimmicks and traffic techniques come and go,
but the ones that really work are those that stand the test
of time. This article highlights what I consider to be the
most effective methods to promote your web site of all time.

1. Get Your Site High In The Search Engines

Getting your site linked high in the search engines for
your keywords and keyphrases.

One of the best ways to do this is to ensure your site has
a good number of incoming links from quality sites - I
discuss how to achieve this with relative ease below.

Also make sure that your site reflects the
keywords/keyphrases that you are looking for - they should
be in your title tag, your headline tags, and in your
initial paragraphs. Don't however over do it, or it will
look like "keyword stuffing" and you will do more damage
than good - just make sure they are there in a natural
fashion.

Don't aim for the most popular keywords, you will have a
much harder time achieving success. Do some analysis using
a tool such as WordTracker.com, and aim for keywords and
keyphrases for which you have a fighting chance.

2. Create A Buzz

If your site offers something new and exciting, it creates
a wow factor, and news about your site will spread far and
wide with very little further effort on your part.

I stumbled on how effective this was myself almost by
accident, when I created one of the very first popup
generators online and added it to my first very amateurish
web site. It was free for people to use, I did no promotion
of it whatsoever, but people came from far and wide to use
it, it was mentioned in many high profile ezines with large
readerships, and it proved so successful that with some
further development it turned into a piece of software that
I still sell today on one of my sites.

3. Don't Waste Your Visitors

Every visitor that comes to your site is hard-earned - so
don't 'waste' them. You want them to come back, to return
time and time again. This will ensure your traffic climbs
over time, rather than remains static.

First, ensure your site doesn't scare them away. Make it
easy to use, visually appealing, and treat critical emails
that you may receive from visitors from time to time like
gold - while not all criticisms are valid representations
of how the majority of visitors see your site, some of
these emails can help you turn your business around if you
listen in a positive manner instead of react negatively and
defensively.

Secondly, try to subscribe as many visitors as possible to
a list, so that you can correspond with them time and time
again. Sending them news about your site for example will
keep them coming back.

4. Pay-Per-Click Engines

Bidding for keywords on PPCs like Google Adwords won't
usually bring you large amounts of traffic, but if you do
it carefully, the traffic it does bring you should be
highly targeted and therefore very valuable.

The trick is to know your stats. Know exactly what your
sales conversion rates are per keyword, and how much
investment on each keyword is viable for you.

For example, let's say your site sells artist pencils:

- If you are bidding $0.30 for the keyword 'pencil', each
sale of a box of pencils brings you $10 profit, but if only
1 in 100 clicks for the keyword 'pencil' brings you a sale,
you are spending $30 for each sale of $10, which is losing
you a large amount of money.

- However, if you are bidding $0.10 for the keyphrase
'artist pencils', and 1 in 25 buys from your site, you are
spending $2.50 on each sale that brings you a profit of
$10, which is a profitable investment - i.e. it brings you
a net profit of $7.50 per sale.

5. Strategic Linking

This can be one of the most important methods to generate
traffic over the long-term. Not only can you receive
traffic direct from the links, the more links there are,
the higher your position will tend to be in the search
engines.

In my opinion, I've never found reciprocal linking
strategies particularly effective, i.e. you can spend a
great deal of time building up single links to your site,
and as they are reciprocal, they are not as effective as
the non-reciprocal links that the search engines prefer.
The fact is that search engines know about reciprocal
linking strategies, and reciprocal links only tell the
search engines that you have a reciprocal linking strategy,
not that your site is an effective resource that other
sites are willingly linking to in a more natural fashion.

The following two methods are in my opinion the most
effective ways to build up links, and concentrating on
these can repay dividends over the long-term:

a. Article Submissions

The idea here is that you write an article that other
webmasters and publishers can freely reprint on their web
sites. Other sites and publishers desperately need content
- you simply provide it. The pay-off for you is that to
reprint it, they have to include your resource box that
contains a link to your web site, and in the majority of
cases, the link will be of the valuable non-reciprocal kind.

By writing your article and then distributing it as widely
as possible, you can end up with hundreds of incoming links
to your site from other quality web sites. This can be the
most effective site promotion strategy there is.

(For more detailed information on how to do this, you can
subscribe to a free course at
http://www.takanomi.com/publish-articles.php )

b. Your Own Affiliate Program

With an affiliate program, people link to your site and
receive a commission on any sales that result from their
referrals.

This provides a strong encouragement for others to provide
links to your site - the trick is to ensure the affiliate
link actually links direct to your domain and not through a
third-party site, otherwise they will get the benefit from
the link rather than you.
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Steve Shaw provides systems and software for effective
e-marketing. His article distribution system can lead to
hundreds of valuable incoming non-reciprocal links to your
web site. Find out more at: http://www.submityourarticle.com
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