Search engines

Many people, perhaps even a majority of people, will use search engines and the Yahoo! directory to find what they’re looking for on the Web. So the place to start in promotion is to design webpages that will be indexed well by the search engines, using descriptive titles and accurate META tags. When you’re ready, submit your site so that search engines will index (“spider”) it, using a submission tool such as the All4One Submission Machine http://www.all4one.com/all4submit/ or JimTools. http://www.jimtools.com/ Getting a listing in the Yahoo! Directory is the most important task — and the most difficult. You may even have to pay them $199 to agree to consider within one week whether to add your site. Search engines are important. Be persistent. If your site doesn’t show up within a few weeks, submit again … and again … and again.

Linking strategies

Linking strategies are a second essential type of site promotion. The more links pointing to your site, the more traffic you’ll experience (and the greater perceived “popularity” will rank you higher in the search engines). To get someone to link to your site you need to ask. The simplest way is to find complementary sites, link to them on a linking page, and ask them to link to you. The key, of course, is for your site to have content that so good that it’s worth linking to. No one wants to link to a nothing website. Ask for links on sites that cover your industry, as wells from associations your business belongs to. One twist on this is to join a Web Ring with each member site linking to the next member site along the chain. http://www.webring.org/ Other approaches are to offer the best (and most trafficked) websites an “award” that consists of an award logo with a link pointing back to your site. Another popular method is to join a banner exchange. For every two banners displayed on your site promoting other businesses, one of your banners will be shown an another member site. The biggest exchange is Microsoft bCentral LinkExchange. http://adnetwork.bcentral.com/ I’ve given up on the so-called Free For All (FFA) linking sites; don’t even waste your time there. Another important form of linking promotion involves paying affiliates for sales resulting from links to your site, but we’ll cover that under paid advertising.

Viral strategies

An increasingly important process is to design a strategy that encourages others to carry your marketing message via e-mail, using their own network of relationships — and preferably their own resources. This is called “viral marketing” after the way viruses multiply rapidly in a cell, commandeering the cell’s resources to do the virus’s bidding. The classic example is HotMail.com, a free e-mail system. Each e-mail message (sent by definition to a person’s own friends and associates) carries a message encouraging the recipient to sign up for a HotMail account, too. Another example is postcard or greeting cards, each of which carries a message encouraging the recipient to send a card to a friend — carrying the siteowner’s marketing message. If you can write quality articles, you can offer them to others to use on their websites or in their newsletters, each article carrying a link to your website. Public relations to get press coverage is a kind of viral strategy, if you think about it.

Public relations

Public relations, the task of getting press coverage, is still a vital type of site promotion. If you can get a news release picked up by several print and/or Internet publications you’ll get a tremendous boost in traffic, all for “free,” letting the news periodical’s network carry your marketing message. Of course, nothing’s really free. You’ll need to have a truly newsworthy event, contest, free service, chat room or something or no decent publication will consider it news. Coming up with “free” services and events isn’t inexpensive, but the ensuing publicity can be excellent you may get an unbiased editorial recommendations that you couldn’t purchase for any amount of money. While there are free news release services, expect to pay several hundred dollars to have your news release sent to hundreds of subscribing periodicals.

The mateiral containted in this document is intellectual property of GoodVIllager LLC. Do not disclose with out authorization

Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste nat us error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vita edicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit sed.