every 5 weeks

It worked for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but it probably won’t work for your website or mine.

Promotion of a website is an important factor that most people ignore. All websites even those with great content, however beautiful, and solidly constructed need promotion, or they will lay dormant.

First off some websites will NEVER get a lot of traffic, and that’s OK. Some sites aren’t built for large numbers of users, and don’t be discouraged if you don’t get them. Take this website for example, I really don’t expect millions of people to come read these posts, but I’m OK with that, understand what your trying to do with your website, and you’ll save yourself from a lot of headaches.

If you do want lots of people to come, what can you do?

(The tips are listed in no particular order, what works well for one website will not do as well for another. A technique that works for one person will not do well for another. It is best experiment with all the techniques until you get a feel for what will for you and the website you are trying to promote.)

• Restrict Access. There’s nothing like telling people they can’t have an account to make them kick and scream until they get one.
• Write a press release. This can be daunting, only big companies write press releases right? Nope, anyone can. Doesn’t mean you’ll get anything out it if you do, but if you have compelling story, you could get some decent coverage. Also, its a sure fire way to get into the likes of Google news.
• Email everyone you know! It may not bring you a lot of traffic (unless you know a lot of people), but it will get the ball rolling, and show some activity on the website for when real visitors come calling. And you’re friends may tell their friends, and it gets all viral like that. Remember to update your signature to include links to your website.
• Social bookmarking. del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and many others services exist to help you manage and share your bookmarks. Bookmark your sites and others will too. Be sure to make it easy for your users to bookmark too, to improve your rankings.
• Social news gathering. Digg and Reddit, to name a couple. Some people frown on submitting your own news or sites, but isn’t that part of the point? I’m not saying spam them with every page of your site, but if its relevant submit it. A lot of niche user submitted sites are popping up so even if you don’t make to the home page of Digg, try some of those and you might get better quality traffic.
• Comment. Find blogs that match your website content, and make comments to the posts. Be careful to write useful comments, or you’ll do more harm then good. Remember to link back to the website you’re promoting.
• Galleries. Your site is beautiful right? Built with web standards? There are many galleries that will show your lovely website to large numbers of people. The traffic may not be very targeted, but its about getting the word out. A couple of sites exist to make your life easier in submitting.
• Stay Involved. You’ve built the website, but it doesn’t run itself. You’ll need to watch the website, and engage the users if appropriate. If your website has comments they’ll need to moderated, and responded too. If you stay involved the visitor will too and be more likely to return.
• Exchange links. Find sites with related subject to your website and ask the webmaster if they’ll exchange links to the benefit of both your visitors. I must admit I don’t do this one much, but it works well or some people.
• RSS. One of the simplest ways to keep people coming back is to offer an RSS feed for news or important information. Since it take no real effort for the user once the RSS feed is added to their preferred reader, they can easily be informed new information about your website.
• Keep working. You’ve got those users, now keep them coming back by adding more content and more features to your website.
• Forum postings. This is much like posting on Digg or Reddit. If you’re a member of forum (and their rules allow it) announce your website, or post a discussion related to something hosted on your site.
• Advertising. Oh no, you should have to spend money to promote your website! Yet people do it every day. You may not have a lot of money for this, but if you budget with this in mind, it could garner great results.

These techniques should help drive traffic almost immediately, but also help with building page rank and back links, which in turn help with better search engine ranks, which you guessed it leads to more traffic.

Finally, be patient, if you build it they will come … eventually. All sites, yes there are a few exceptions, take time to become the big. Over night success is craved by everyone, but success takes time and hard work.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few ways, so feel free to share.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Methodology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.