Website Promotion Basics

If you've reached this page after following my tips on search engine optimization and submitted your website to the search engines and directories, you're ready to use other website promotion resources while waiting for you web pages to get listed.

There are many ways to letting people know about your website, some free and some for a fee. I know most new marketers want to spend as little as possible on web site promotion, so on this page are the basic promotion categories that you will find that all webmasters who receives a decent amount of visitors recommend for building your traffic.

These resources work. You do get visitors, but it can be very little and slow at times. The resources I suggest in each category are ones that I use to build web site traffic to my pages. I listed these to save you some time and allow you to get started right away. When you have time, try similar services and continue promoting your website.

Tracking Your Results

To monitor your own results from using the resources below and any others you so choose, you will need the capability to track the results of your advertising. For that, I highly recommend TrackThatAd, a free resource that will allow you to track any URL you want. With just one TrackThatAd link, you can see how many people clicked on your ezine ad, banner link, splash page or whatever you linked to. I live by it! In fact, I use it to determine if many resources get listed on this page.

I can give you one piece of advice about this service from experience. If you continue to use the free version, I would advise you not to use to track any pages you may use on traffic exchanges. There is a short delay when your link is passed through the software and for some of the traffic exchanges, this could be long enough for you page NOT to be displayed before the viewer is off to the next page in the que.

Another good resource for tracking visitors is StatCounter. Not as powerful as TrackThatAd, but you are provided with loads of information like your most popular pages, entry and exit pages, where your visitors came from, keyword analysis, the path your visitors took, length of their visits, number of returning visitors and more.

All you have to do to get these results is place a small snippet on each page that you want to monitor. It's a pretty slick system if you ask me.

Traffic Exchanges

A traffic exchange is a web site that shows you member websites and in return, delivers free traffic to your web site. There are hundreds of them! Some will tell you to join as many as you can and earn as many credits as you can to get your web page known. Being only a part-time marketer, I don't have the time to do that. So, below are the handful I use regularly. Although all traffic exchange surfers visit your website, the ones I actually received signups for my newsletter are the ones that made this page.

Side Note: If you have more than one website you want to promote in traffic exchanges, before you get started, I strongly recommend you get yourself a good page rotator. Creating a free account with PageSwirl will allow you to promote up to five websites with just one URL.

When you join many traffic exchanges and use a rotator URL, you only have to PageSwirl URL, if you want to change a link, all you have to do is log into your PageSwirl and update it there. Your new link will be automatically displayed on all the traffic exchanges you belong to. Now on to my recommended traffic exchanges:

TrafficSwarm - A very well known traffic exchange used by many. What I like about it is the fact that each page contains 8 ads and when you click on them, they're usually worth 1-5 credits (occasionally, you can 50 credits but I haven't figured how often that happens -- yet!). I've earned between 19 and 32 credits for one page. One time, I built 199 credits in 22 minutes! With the option of targeting your groups, these credits aren't just wasted on every surfer either.

EzHomeBizTraffic - Not only can you select a catergory to place your site in, you can also surf by category. It's a small exchange with just over 1,100 members (as of this writing), but it's cheat proof.

TrueViewTraffic - What do I like about TrueTrafficView? Well, for one, it give you the ability to control the quality of your traffic. You can submit questions about your site that surfers have to answer correctly to earn credit for viewing the site. Loyalty surfing is another nice feature offered. You are given bonuses for being an active surfer. To be qualified for a day, you must surf 20 sites that given day. If you surf 7 consecutive days, you receive a bonus. If you surf 14 consecutive days, you will receive an even larger bonus, and so on.

TrafficSplash - Another good one because it let's you target your audience. Categories include Advertising, General Interest, Businessess and Money Making. Just choose the category that best fits the web site you're promoting and it will only be shown to surfers interested in that category.

Traffic Syndicate 25 (TS25) - With other traffic exchanges, you earn credits by surfing and referring others who surf. With TS25, your downline is built for you based on your own performance. If you work hard, you'll earn a top spot in the syndicate downline and you'll instantly get a downline of active surfers.

ClickNPutt - a pro only manual traffic exchange that can deliver quality website visits from pre-qualified buyers. You will be promoting your sites to serious online marketers. A ClicknPutt lifetime membership is only $19.99

Forum Posting

Another excellent source of free website traffic. With most forums, you can register as a member and create a profile. Within this profile, you can create a sigline that will be included on every post you make.

Not only does this provide a way for readers to check out your website, many of the search engines that use crawlers will pick up your link as well.

This won't help much with descriptive entries in the search engines, but it does provide back links to your web site that help with overall ranking.

Here what you need to do:

1) Find forums in your niche. For example, my target audience is internet marketing beginners, so I usually hang around forums related to internet marketing, work at home, etc.

2) Read some of the current posts and get a feel for what the rules are and who posts good content.

3) If you generally like the forum, then register has a member. Make sure you add your sigline!

4) Look for an introduction area to introduce yourself. When possible, try to let this be the very first post you make in a new forum.

5) After you've posted your introduction, start posting replies to some of the current posts or create a new one.

To get you started, here are a few good marketing related forums for beginners I frequently visit :

• Real Life Internet Marketers Get-Together
  
• Work at Home
  
• Self-Starters Weekly Tips
  
• IM4Newbies Internet Marketing
• Internet4Newbies
• Ghostwriting Forum

Now here is something a little different. myLot is an open community where you can create a profile, view and participate in discussions, news, and blog postings tailored to your indiividual interests and personal experience. It's completely customizeable by you and It's spam-free because you have complete control over who can send you emails. You are also paid for discussions you create and participate in. We're talking only pennies here, but why not earn while having some fun. Click here to visit myLot.

Article Marketing

Writing articles is probably the easiest (and FREE!) way to build your web site traffic. Simply put, you write an article on a topic related to your website (or affiliate link), attach an "about the author" tagline at the end and post it to as many article directories as you can. The objective being that other publishers will include your article in their newsletters, blogs or web sites.

Now I can't teach you how to write articles, but either Melanie Mendelson or Bonnie Jo Davis can, depending on how you want to learn:

The 30 Minute Article System - With this ebook (PDF format) and personal audio coaching program, Melanie teaches you, step-by-step, how to create articles on nearly any subject in 30 minutes. Now, it could be the age or the fact that I'm a part-time marketer, but it took more like an hour and 10 minutes to create an article. This is my #1 recommendation.

Write Your Way to Profit - Marketing with Articles Made Simple - This is an 30-lesson email course created by Bonnie Jo that's delivered by e-mail every other day for sixty days.

I personally haven't taken this course, but I've heard nothing but positive feedback from others who have purchased it and felt it was worth listing here as a viable resource.

Ok, ok, so you just don't want to do it yourself! There's always the option of having someone write articles for you. These are known as "ghostwriters". They do all the writing, you put your name on it:

Written Magic - Stephanie Davies not only writes articles for you, but she also does newsletters, solo ads, optimized web site pages and ebooks. Another service I haven't personally used -- yet, but I plan on testing it out soon.

SafeLists

A safelist is a mailing list that allows you to email your advertisement to other list members in exchange, you agree to receive advertising emails from the other members. Many more experienced marketers believe safelists are a complete watse of time for web site promotion. Since most members are usually there for the same reason - to sell something, it is difficult getting others to open your email ads. Use interest subjects to try and get the reader's attention (but keep it honest!). Hint: I sometimes like to use the ads to help improve my own ad copy skills.

BusinessWorldList - a lot more than just a safelist. The members area iss jam packed with innovative tools to improve traffic and sales.one of my favorite things about this website is that it is extremely user-friendly and easy to reach a large audience (over 64,00 at the time of this writing). You can also post internal announcements to the entire mailing list, get free ad tracking, other submission tools, and more.

Herculist - Offering up 41,900+ responsive members (as of this writing). While you're there, purchase the smart-list. This is a mailing list of about 5,000 opportunity seekers you can email as long as you included their 'canned spam" heading and provide an opt-out method.

GOT Safelist - Credit based. You earn email and banner credits as well as cash for clicking the credit links included in each emails you receive.

What I like about this safelist is that you can create a hotlink to a website that will be viewed by other readers for 10 seconds when they click on the credit link included in your email ad.

So in essense, you can actually promote two websites with one mailing because your ad can be for an entirely different website.

There are currently 8,200+ active readers as of this writing and as a free member, you can mail you ad to 2,500 random members.

When you first signup, you are given 5,000 credits. That's enough to send two ads to 2,500 each. Go ahead and try it out and see what kind of results you get. When you first login, just read the "Getting Started" section to learn how to setup everything up before you send your first ad.

NOTE: Do consider using a separate email account because they send lots of email ads and you will want to read and click links to earn more credits and cash.

Miscellaneous Promotion Resources

Below are some more promotion resources that didn't fit into any of the categories above:

LinkReferral - GREAT resource for getting targeted visitors to your web site! Once you add your web site to their directory, you can keep it listed in the top half of your chosen category by simply logging in at least once per day. You can have your web site rank higer by viewing other member sites, providing reviews of their web sites and posting in the forum.

Here's a nifty program that will help you get more traffic from traffic exchanges and generate residual income streams from your traffic generation. Create a free account with VitalViral, receive your simple set-up instructions and watch your traffic start to grow within days.