10 Ways to Promote Your Website ...

If your website does not participate in an affiliate program, then you need to think about joining one. Affiliates are other websites – usually with a similar purpose to yours – that exchange links with your website: you link to them, they link to you. This will lead to a substantial increase in your web traffic, and is perfect for smaller businesses as you can often contact the website privately and work out a deal. Affiliates can bring in up to 50% of your total sales – the more affiliates you have, the more traffic you will receive.

A great way for search engines to index your site is to increase the amount of incoming links to your website. You can easily create links to your website by using other website’s comment facilities or even by creating other dummy websites for that sole purpose. Methods of doing this will be discussed further on in my list of 10 ways to promote your website, so read on.

Internet blogs have become one of the main marketing tools for websites, with many large corporations now using them to attract more visitors to their site. There are plenty of free blogging tools available on the internet, so cost isn’t a factor here: all you have to do is create a simple blog, link to other blogs and then link back to your site using the blog and comments. A great free way to gather more website traffic.

SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t easy to achieve, but can bring in potentially thousands of visitors to your website. The easiest way to achieve good SEO is to include lots of keyword-rich articles and pages on your website. You can spam other websites with your links all you want, but SEO will always come out on top.

Using videos to promote your website is one of the newest, yet most effective, ways to bring in traffic. By creating a “viral” video and uploading it to the major video sites (Google and YouTube), you are able to reach an extensive and diverse range of visitors that may not have previously heard of your website. If you create an entertaining and catchy video, people will recommend it to others – soon you could have hundreds of visitors to your website (as you must link your website address in the video).

As mentioned in point #4, content is very important for SEO. However you do not want to create multiple pages that spam the key words you are advertising – what you want to do is create good, quality articles that will gather traffic for you. This is one of the most important ways to promote your website

Press releases are often overlooked by small businesses when it comes to advertising techniques. The media are always happy to publish stories about new, small websites that offer something unique; press releases should be a regular way of getting cheap advertising.

Every small business has a business card that it hands out. However does your business card offer any discounts or freebies? You can usually fit all the information that you need to on one side of the card – instead of using the back of the card to fill with a fancy logo or graphic, you can offer some exclusive offers and discount codes that will bring you more traffic. Everyone loves a bargain!

One of the best ways to promote your website is to use discussion boards and forums. If you find a niche forum that you can post in to advertise your market, you’ll gain hundreds of visitors. Regular quality posts in forums and discussion boards that help newcomers and answer questions can be a great way to develop a relationship between your website and the customer.

My final way to promote your website is largely based around the affiliate program. Joint ventures are a platform for you to work in cooperation with another website to keep the costs of advertising for you both low – you can exchange articles, give exclusive discount offers and advertise each other’s website.

I hope that my list of 10 ways to promote your website has been beneficial to you. Every small business that is just starting out needs to find ways to broaden its traffic, so these tips should come in very handy. Please do comment here if you have any other tips to share, I’m sure they will be appreciated.

Top Photo Credit: Jason Santa Maria