Website promotion isn’t one of my favorite things to do, in fact I’ll often spend time tinkering and procrastinate when it comes to promoting. But tinkering is wasting valuable time.
As hard as it is, you’ll be a lot more productive working on promoting your site because that’s where the traffic and sales will come from.
When sales are down or I notice less visitors I tend to gravitate towards making site changes, kind of a habit of mine 
But the truth is, making site changes won’t bring in the traffic. Getting more traffic requires getting the word out by participating socially and creating valuable inbound links.
If you’re not getting at least 200 visitors a day to your site, then you need more traffic! That means you need to get promoting.
As you promote more and as you get more customer feedback you’ll find yourself making site changes gradually to suit your customer’s needs. Site changes will be enhancements as opposed to reactions to no sales.
First off, let me stress the importance of ‘focus’. If you have more than one website, take a long hard look at which site is the most important to focus on. Don’t confuse your mind by jumping back and forth from site to site, take stock of what site can benefit you the most at this time and work on promoting only that site.
Next find out what your best keywords are by using Wordtracker (free trial). Do this for your home page and your primary sales pages (the pages you hope to make the most sales with).
You need good keywords for your anchor text. Your anchor text is what links your site to your best keywords or keyword phrases. Anchor text will look like this:
<a href=”http://www.yourpagename.com”> Keywords </a>
Submit your site to the search engines and directories.
I can’t possibly list them all but this is a good start:
http://www.google/addurl/
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx/
Write and submit articles on your topic, then submit them to the best article banks. Create a resource box for each article with deep links that bring visitors to the web pages that relate best to the article. Don’t link to your home page unless absolutely necessary.
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com/article_submission.shtml
http://www.webpronews.com/submit
http://www.isnare.com
http://www.associatedcontent.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.articlesbase.com/
Next focus on Social networking, it’s is one of the best ways to accumulate backlinks to your website. Social networking sites allow you to create personalized pages about you and your website and you can promote your articles.
Get involved with the following social networking sites and get known. This is by no means an exhaustive list but it’s another good start:
- Create accounts at Myspace.com and Facebook.com with a comprehensive, compelling ‘about me’ pages with your main keyword anchor text.
- Create an account at del.icio.us and Stumbleupon.com and create a profile pages.
- Create an account at Twitter.com and post daily updates when you add content to your website or blog.
- Create accounts at Friendster, Hi5, tagworld. Add your URL with anchor text to the about me fields.
- Take time to find relevant blogs within your niche and make constructive, useful comments. These comments will provide link backs to your site.
- Join groups on the various social sites and get involved in conversations. Show them what you know.
If you have an advertising budget Websubmitter2 will automate all this for you. It’s an excellent time saver and will bring you the traffic you need much faster.
In Summary
Some things will work better for you than others so write those down and add them to your schedule. If you make a plan and work the plan, you WILL see results.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Quite a good post Liz. Your post got me to realise my mistake. Most of the time I used to get side tracked with the new idea of the day, and I started many blogs, but they languished after a few initial posts. I am now focusing on my Email Marketing guide blog site, and trying to build more content by writing quality posts for this blog only – all about Email Marketing. Once I get to your suggested number of 200 site visits a day, then I’ll think of moving to another blog. Till then, you’ll see me on this blog only.
Thanks for reminding.
Cheers,
Vinai
Editor, Email Marketing Guide ( http://www.email-marketing-guide.net)
Hey Vinai,
I know, it’s easy to get side tracked with new ideas and with reading email, sometimes we have to reign ourselves in and stay on target. It can be hard sometimes.
BTW your email marketing site has lots of good advice, keep up the good work!