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Twenty One Ways To Promote Your Site

March 21st, 2010

In this ‘small‘ post we thought to recap some of the techniques that can be used to market your new site. Most of these are already known, but it is always nice to have all of them collected in one place :

Yahoo Answers.

Answering questions at http://answers.yahoo.com can be proven an extremely efficient marketing strategy. People there leave thousands of questions and many of them remain unanswered. Answering questions, and solving problems in a category similar to your line of business (i.e. Computer Engineer, SEO, marketing, work from home, business models) can easily make you an ‘expert’ of the specific field. Being the expert means that people will want to actually visit your site and learn more. Further to this answering questions on yahoo answers can produce a number of backlinks for your site.

MySpace

MySpace has more than 110 million monthly active users and over 300.000 new signups every daily. Getting this for a fact, you could considered that the returns from a successful MySpace campaign could be huge. So the more ‘friends’ you have on MySpace the better the changes you have to transform some of them into customers. First of all create a Profile using CSS to style your MySpace profile as close as possible to the site that you want to market (including any logos). Secondly start adding targetted friends by using the MySpace searching facility (i.e. by using keywords like freelancer,marketing). Some general advices on how you will go on are :

Never spam
Avoid the use of bot friends adders because you could easily get banned.
Join as many relevant groups as possible and participate within the groups.
Post interesting bulletins that provide useful information
Send friend requests to users within the groups you’ve joined.
Use graphics in your posts to catch the attention of the reader.
Use catchy titles, anything boring will be ignored

Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups ( http://groups.yahoo.com/) is a great place for people to talk and exchange ideas. You can search and join yahoo groups , which are immediate related with your site (i.e. Freelancers, Wholesale,stocked products) and start spreading the word for you new web site. Note that if a group has 2,000 members, and you post a message, you will have potential 2,000 users reading your message and maybe visiting your site. Members of the groups are always interested to learn information on new sites and ideas.

If you want to make group users even more interested on your site, you can offer some free content and tools on them. This will make your site even more appealing to them.

You can even create you own group and start posting. People which are interested in the subjects you post will became members of your group.

Stumbleupon.com

StubmleUpon is a great site, which allows people to share stories, information and links. Download the stumbleupon toolbar and ensure you click “I like this” to all of your websites, and have your friends and family do the same and click the “I like this” to all your sites. Also create pages specifically for stumbleupon that either is funny and odd, which can range from funny pictures to funny videos. This works well since Stumbleupon users love to browse sites that have odd and funny stuff, or even free stuff would work good as well.

Forum linking

Try to find ‘Do-follow‘ forums that are relevant with your site(s) subject and register. In all forums that you are becoming a member of, include your web sites url in signature of your profile. Having created your signature, start posting!! Create new subjects or reply to existing threats and use your preferred keywords within the links or perhaps catchy titles to entice clicks. Be sure not to SPAM otherwise you can get banned.

Blog commenting

Blog commenting is a great way to advertise your site and also gain some backlinks. It is usually in the center of many link building strategies followed today. You can easily promote your site, by identifying related blogs and comment on their posts. In most blogs you can include the URL of your site during the commenting procedure. Two things that you must note here is that in order to get backlinks, the blogs must be do-follow, and that you must make sure that your comments provide some value to the users of the blog (i.e. just don’t leave a post if you have nothing to add). You can easily find such blogs by simple searching the Google :

http://followlist.com/
http://www.stephanmiller.com/the-ultimate-dofollow-blog-list/

Craigslist.org

Craigslist is a great place to promote your web site and service. It allows you to submit your free ads Frelance jobs, freelance resources, freelancers, freelancing,consultants, consulting, contractors;but be sure not to spam it. Just one or two ads per week in a few select cities will do the trick. Don’t submit too many adds because you could be flagged or labeled as spam. As afinal note ensure to use catchy titles to ensure your ad is read.

Site maps

Sitemaps is the best way to help search engine crawl your site. If you want to have high rankings you must definitely include a site map in your sites and submit it to google. You can create a free site map using the following site.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

When finished, then upload it to your site, then submit it to

Google using the link below: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?hl=en

Submit your sitemaps using Yahoo Site Explorer, similar format to

Google Webmaster Tools http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Directories Submission

Directories is one of the oldest way to get backlinks. Most Web admins already do this, but just in case you haven’t, you should submit to directories. A good list of directories can be found in:

http://strongestlinks.com/directories.php

Try to submit your site to high PR Do Follow directories. You can easily check if the directory is a Do Follow by clicking on a link inside the directory and checking on its properties. If it says ‘No follow’ then this is not a Do follow directory and you can skip it.

A site with many do follow directories is: http://squidooeventlog.com/dofollow-directories/

When you submitting to directories, ensure that the title and description of you submission is carefully selected. The words to be used there is what the Search Engines use to index your site. You can use the Web Masters Keyword analysis tools ( http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml ) to test the words that you must include your submission.

Tell a Friend

A Tell-a-Friend script must be installed on your site. These scripts enable you users to access the email/facebook/twitter/myspace accounts and massively send invitations for your site to their friends. If you have a joomla / Drupa / Wordpress based site, it is very easy to download an install a module or widget/plugin for this. For all other sites you can download a PHP script for this. For any case OpenInviter is a nice and free option (http://openinviter.com/)

Search Engine Optimization

The way you site is structure and build is very important. There are a number of programming good and bad practices that can help you gain good search result positions. Meta tags, page names, breadcrumbs, alt text on images, are just few examples. SEO is an important aspect of any new web site and must be taken seriously. Some sites that contain really useful advice on this are :

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=3
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=12
http://forums.seochat.com/
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/

Squidoo.com

Squidoo.com is a free popular platform that allows you to create overview pages. These pages, called lenses, usually simulate small one page blogs and include articles, photographs, videos and links. Such lenses could be a great marketing tool for you site. You can create a lense in an subject similar to your new site. There you could post articles and links to your site.

Social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites are really important for your new marketing strategy. People use them to share the Hyperlinks and Interesting sites they discovered on the Net. Posting your web site to these can create a stream of new visitors and also new back-links.

http://del.icio.us/ PageRank: 8/10
http://www.furl.net/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.simpy.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://del.icio.us/ PageRank: 8/10
http://www.backflip.com/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.blinklist.com/ PageRank: 6/10
http://bluedot.us/ PageRank: 6/10
http://de.lirio.us/bookmarks/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.diigo.com/user/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.shadows.com/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.markaboo.com/ PageRank: 5/10
http://ma.gnolia.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://linkagogo.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://netvouz.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.mister-wong.de/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.spurl.net/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.rawsugar.com/ PageRank: 6/10
http://www.stumbleupon.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.digg.com/ PageRank: 8/10
http://www.blogmarks.net/ PageRank: 7/10
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.netvouz.com/ PageRank: 7/10
http://www.taggly.com/ PageRank: 5/10
http://www.lookmarks.com/ PageRank: 5/10

Article Promotion

Creating articles related to the subject area of your site and submitting them to the numerous free article directories can give you a number of backlinks. Make sure to use keyword analysis tools, in order to select the keywords that you will use in these articles. Some examples of such article directories are:

Listen to your Users.

As a new site you are only going to have few users/visitors. One of things that will make them return back to you is to ensure that they can communicate their opinions /ideas/thoughts regarding your site with you (aka that their voice is heard). This will make them feel more comfortably with your site and feel that they participate in the process of making it better.

The information collected from such processes greatly helps in improving your site, because they can be used as bug reports and/or features requirements, and also assist in increasing the number of returning visitors.

To do this you can either include a feedback form on your site, or even better use one of the Feedback Management services that exist today (i.e. http://www.uservoice.com/ )

Alexa.com

Alexa is a popular place to allow users and provide reviews for other sites . You can register and regularly review popular websites on Alexa.com, making sure that at the end of your review you will add the URL of your site. It may not hyperlink automatically but may still bring some traffic to your site.

Newsletter

A newsletter box on your website that will allow all visitors to subscribe and receive updates. You must build a regular newsletter and inform your users, o new offers, changes and products. This will ensure that your users will never forget the site and increase the number of returning visitors. You can also have your users register their Date Of Birth and automatically send them an electronic birthday card.

You can use an email marketing service in order to automated some parts of this process. Some examples are: aweber.com, getresponse.com, constantcontact.com for the newsletter subscriptions.

Pay per Click search engines

I’ve listed this due to the fact most of you probably already know this , but I can’t have a list of marketing techniques without mentioning PPC. Google Adwords, Microsoft Ad Center and Yahoo Search Marketing are the big three. Other options are SearchFeed.com, Goclick.com.

For a analytical list of pay per click search engines see link below:

http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/

Twitter

One of the latest trends in Marketing is Twitter.com, the microblogging platform. You can create a twitter account for your site, register you site address and description (i.e. The free online library) in your new Twitter account profile and start twitting. Start posting things (i.e. articles,photographs,videos,news) that are of interest to you and related to your site. If you have a blog you can automated this process by using special Wordpress pluings and Joomla components.

People that are interested in your postings are going to soon become your followers. Everything you post can be seen by all of your followers, which in their turn can retwitt it in order to share it with their followers (i.e. imagine that you have 1000 followers and each one of them has another 1000 followers, Can you see the big picture ?) Having a big number of followers can greatly help you in promoting your products and services.

Facebook Fan Page

Facebook currently offers a great place to promote your products and service. Just consider the case that Facebook has more than 60 million active users. The returns from using facebook as a marketing platform can be high. There are tons of different ways that you can advertise over Facebook.

Fan Pages

It is very easy to create a Facebook Page (http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages) and invite your friends (and their friends) to became fans of your page. In a while you will see that your fans pages can easily grow into having thousands of fans. This will greatly help you with branding your new site and products.

Facebook Application

You can create, or have a freelancer do it for you,or even buy, a silly small Facebook application. Such applications could include, games, puzzles , quizzes ,jokes of the day or anything that a user will want have and share with his friend. These application could be distributed around your friends and their friends( following the pattern of viral process) for free (yes free!!! if its free people will definitely want to try it). But in this application you could include a banner, the colors, and the logos of your Web Site. This is what Branding is all about.

Facebook Adverts

Final but not least, you could use the Facebook Advertising System (similar to Google’s ) to create a facebook banner for your new site. The huge difference with other systems is that facebook allows you to control the target audience of your advert (e.g. age,country,job,title)

Blog

It’s a proven fact that search engines love blogs. The question we should ask ourselves is why do they love blogs? It’s pretty simple, search engines love to search and find new quality content. Search Engines target to index high quality novel information . But ensure that the content that you post on your blog is original. Search engines do not like to see articles or content that already exists on thousands of other sites. You must update your content regularly in order to ensure better Search Engine Ranking.

But blogs are not only for search engines. Having a blog that includes good quality content will increase you user returning rates. Users may not come to your site to buy, but they will come to read. Even so, your site still will get targeted traffic, and thus higher rankings and publicity.

There are many free sites on the Internet that will allow you to create your own blog and they will host it for you. Some examples are :

If you are like me, you will prefer to host your own blog, so you will nee to find your own hosting solution and domain and then download and install a blog engine like WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com).

Having completed your blog, now it the time to start advertising. There are a number of directories out there which are targeted to blog owners. It will be quite a strong marketing policy to submit your blog to these Directories. Some examples are: