Web site promotion

How the promote your site on the Internet

If you are just starting to promote your first web site, you'll find that web site promotion is hard work. There are no instant recipes for success. Fortunately, you don't have to actively promote your web site forever. There are two main reasons for this.

• When your site becomes successful you will find many other sites interested in a reciprocal link arrangement. Exchanging highly visible links with other successful sites, will bring in lots of extra traffic. The links with other high quality sites will also indicate to search engines that your site is important, and as a result they are more likely to rank you higher.
• If you have a good site, with high quality content, you will retain a large number of your visitors as clients. They will come again and again as repeat visitors. Building up those repeat visitors is the key to a successful internet venture.

Where do you start

If you have a unique web site, the major ten search engines and directories will be your most important source of web traffic. You'll have to learn to use meta tags in your documents and you should probably avoid frames in your web design. To find out more about search engine promotion, please visit the successful web design site.

If your web site is not that unique, as most are, you'll find it very hard to be ranked high enough in the search engines listings to get their traffic. There are, for instance, hundreds of free graphics sites. You should still submit to the major search engines and try to get as high as possible for a few keywords, but other traffic generation strategies will become more important.

Targeted and untargeted traffic

If you have little or no money to spend, there is really only one strategy. Use a combination of traffic generation schemes and banner advertising. These traffic generation schemes will get you general untargeted traffic that you can partly convert into targeted traffic through the use of one or more banner exchange programs. Some excellent banner exchanges are Net-on banner exchange, Linkbuddies and Free banners. 

There are several programs that promise to drive traffic to your web site, but I found the ClickThru Network the only worthwhile traffic generation scheme. As a member of this program you can drive enormous amounts of mostly untargeted traffic to your site by just browsing the Internet. Some of these visitors to your site will be interested and become repeat visitors.

All that is needed, to get traffic from Clickthru is that you spend some of your time clicking through other peoples web sites. Something that can be very rewarding on its own. Do not just click, but have a look what other people do and try to learn from them. If you can afford it, pay the money to upgrade your free membership of ClickThru. This will increase the efficiency of your clicking efforts tremendously.

If you find many sites similar to your own site on the ClickThru program, the likelihood of you being able to compete with them will only be small. If you find your site to be unique amongst the ClickThru crowd, you will have a much better chance to achieve success. Just make sure you invest your initial income from your web site to get more traffic from outside ClickThru. Relying on ClickThru for your long term success is sure to lead to disaster.

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