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Self-Promotion
When you promote your website, you’re acting as your own advertising firm. No one will know anything about your website unless you tell them. Whether you use a sandwich board and walk up and down the streets or put your URL on a business card, marketing your website increases your exposure and ensures that more people will visit your site. In this article I want to give you some ideas for how to promote your website’s URL for free.
Have Excellent and Unique Content
The most important way to ensure regular traffic to your website is to have the highest quality, unique content. You must set your website apart from millions of others. The easiest way to do this is to trust your own voice and fill your website with the things that interest you. If you have a website that is about making scrapbooks about kids involved in sports, make the best site you can about that. This can include showing the best examples you can find, reviewing products, or offering how-to tutorials. On the other hand, a website that is just rehashed, boring, dull material or, worst of all, devoid of content altogether, will not attract visitors. Try not to make your website only about you and how great you are. People want to find out about new things, not just about you.
Update Content
Having excellent content is the first part. Ensuring there is fresh and interesting content on your website is the second part of the process. When you update content, give visitors who have already been to your site another reason to return. If people come back to your site and nothing has changed, you are not giving them any reason to return again. Update your content as much as you can, but don’t fill your website with fluff or content that can be found anywhere. Instead, infuse new content with your personality and input.
Publicize Your URL
The easiest way for you to get the word out about your website is to publicize your URL. This means having your website address visible to people in ways that make them want to come to your site. An easy way to promote your website is to include the URL on any material you send out. Suppose you have created a website for your cafe. Put the URL on the menu and any coupons you send out. Add the URL to your logo. If you send emails, add your URL to your signature file. Also, if your content and website warrant it, you might want to create a regular newsletter announcing changes to content and any other details that are important. If you decide to do this, send email only to those people who ask for it so you are not accused of sending out spam. You will benefit here if you choose a small, easy-to-remember URL so that it does not confuse visitors or take over your posters.
Connect with Others
You can also promote your website by connecting to other people. Increasing the connections you have on- and offline enables you to share the work you have done with many other people. Remember, you don’t know all the people your friends know, so the number of people who get your message grows as you meet and contact others.
Link to Others
The easiest way to make friends using your website is to link to other websites. Essentially, you put a link to someone else’s website on your website. This makes your site connected with other websites and part of their network. When I link to a new site, I usually drop that site an email and let them know I love what they are doing and that I have linked to them. I never ask them to link back to me, but I do ask them to visit my site to take a look around.
Requesting Links
Requesting links means asking someone to put a link on their site to your site. Because it involves asking a complete stranger to do something, I tend not to do it. There may be special circumstances where this might be feasible, but they are uncommon. Link to others’ sites and in turn, others will link to you on their own.
Leaving Comments
If you run into a blog entry or news story to which you want to add a comment, I encourage you to add your URL in the response. Do not make a blatant advertisement, but if you can leave your website address, do so. You never know who reads your comment and agrees with you. That person might then take the time to visit your site. Just remember that your comment should be relevant to the news story or blog entry, not just an excuse to promote yourself.
Submit Your Site to Web Directories
You might find lists or directories of sites that share your website’s content. If you can find these sites, find out how to get your site listed there by communicating with the people who run the list.
Use Social Media Power
Social media is people sharing information with others that they find important. Several sites such as Digg.com, reddit.com, and stumbleupon.com work in this manner. Explore these sites to find links to sites you might be interested in, and use them to promote your own sites. You might have noticed a number of symbols appearing at the bottom of news stories or blog entries. These symbols are links that allow the reader to share your article or blog post with others on social sharing websites such as Digg.com, Facebook.com, del.icio.us, or others. If you add these to your posts and someone clicks them, your content is shared with millions of other social media users. This goes both ways: If you find something you like, make sure to share it with others. Sites such as Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook also give you a canvass to promote your website. For example, you could use any of these sites to let people on your friends list know that you have new content on your website. For instance, on Facebook you can create notes to promote websites. Why not promote your own?