Promoting Your Website | Internet Marketing on a Mac

Promoting Your Website:
What Works and What Doesn't

The question is not so much "how can I promote my site?" as it is "What is the most time efficient way to promote my site?"

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Now that you've created your website, all you need to do is let the entire world come flocking to your door, right?

Not so fast.

As someone once pointed out, in the world of print publishing, one is limited by publishing costs and the size of the printed page. On the Web, however, one is limited by the attention span of the average person and the number of other resources (other Web pages) competing for their attention. In other words, creating a Web page is relatively easy. The hard part is getting people to actually visit it. This I have found to be the case.

I created my first website in 1996, and even then, the Web was a crowded place. Knowing the number of competing resources on the Web, I decided the best course of action was to create a narrowly focused page, one that would fill a highly specialized niche. Since I have a passing interest in historic architecture, I decided to create a page on that topic, and to narrow it down even further, limit it to the state of Indiana.

I got it listed on a few search engines, including Infoseek and Yahoo! (This was well before the days of Google). And of course there were the link directories with links to Web sites on which you could promote your page. One directory listed 630 such sites. Six hundred and thirty! It boggled the mind.

How many hits did I get in my first three months? Ninety. That's it. That's about one hit per day.

Keep in mind that probably twenty of those were me, checking up to see how many hits I got! Others were undoubtedly merely Web robots. (Surprising to me at the time, some of the robots that purportedly scanned the whole Web, such as WebCrawler and HotBot, never seemed to get to my page. ''If you put up a page yesterday, there will be a one in seven chance it's in our index today,'' said a HotBot spokesman. Yeah, right.)

If the days of fast and easy Web traffic were gone in 1996, think of how much harder it is today.

Since then, I have learned quite a few tricks to publicize your site, and I will share them with you here on InternetMacMarketing.com.

Keep in mind that some of the "standard advice" no longer works very well (if it ever did). Here I will tell you what works and what doesn't. You will benefit from my years of research in finding the most effective ways to promote your website today.

You'll also find on this site lists, reviews, and links to some important Web promotion resources that I have found to be extremely useful. I also offer a number of Web promotion training resources for everyone from the novice to the expert.

So are you ready? All right, let's begin.

Right now I would like to run through the most commonly suggested ways of promoting your website. In Internet marketing, it is not so much a matter of finding ways to promote your site as it is finding the time to do it! There is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Internet promotion strategies. The question is not so much "how can I promote my site?" as it is "What is the most time efficient way to promote my site?"

Let's discuss some of the most commonly used and recommended methods below.

Pay-per-Click Advertising

This can be a little risky, but once you have some experience in Web marketing it should be at the top of your list of marketing strategies.

The biggest player in the market today is Google, with Yahoo trailing some distance behind.
Google's pay per click service is called Adwords, and it has the admirable trait of rewarding advertisers who draw more clicks due to more relevant ads by giving them better positioning and even lower fees. So it really pays to take the time to learn how to use Adwords, as well as to experiment. (Yahoo! also rewards good-performing ads.)

Permission-Based E-mail Marketing

This also works in virtually every instance, if properly done. You simply offer visitors to your site an incentive for subscribing to your newsletter, such as a free e-book or minicourse, and then use an autoresponder to keep in touch with them. Your previous visitors are an ideal market because you know they are interested in your niche, or they wouldn't have visited your site in the first place. There are many professional mailing list services you can choose from.

Blogging

Creating a blog in addition to your website can be a powerful promotion strategy. Many search engines seem to love blogs, but beware! You must be committed to updating a blog frequently. I personally prefer Squidoo over blogs, but in the future I may use both promotional methods.

Submitting Your Site To Search Engines

This is, of course, still as useful a strategy today as it was back in 1996 when I first experimented with it. If anything, however, it has only gotten harder to get a good placement. This leads us to the whole field of SEO, or search engine optimization. This is a huge field in itself, and one of the most difficult methods of Web promotion, since the rules for each search engine are constantly changing. Properly covering this area could easily take a book in itself, or better yet, a whole set of books. This is not the easiest method of site promotion by a long shot, and in my opinion, it is not recommended for beginners, except for the basics, such as creating useful pages with relevant content. The subject will be discussed further in other areas of this site.

Article Marketing

Now we come to one of my favorite website promotion strategies. One of the best ways to get people to visit your site is to get it added as a link on already-established pages. Writing articles on your niche topic is a way to do this. It's free; it costs you nothing and yet it can attract a steady stream of visitors to your site.

Keep in mind, however, that there are a large number of services and software products that supposedly help you with your article marketing campaign. You will see these recommended in printed books, e-books, websites, courses and so on.

Guess what? Many of these software products are not Macintosh compatible! That's right, you will see products and services recommended in training materials that you paid good money for that simply won't run on a Mac! Even worse, others are just plain junk!

This is one of the reasons I started Internet Mac Marketing: to help you find alternatives to software for Web marketers that run on the Mac and that are just as good as the software and services you'll find mentioned in PC-centric publications. On Internet Mac Marketing I will steer you away from PC-only products and towards equally good alternatives that are Mac friendly.

Now, in addition to all of the Web promotion strategies that work, you will find a number of promotions strategies that are listed again and again in beginner's books and courses on Internet marketing that are either expensive or just don't work very well anymore, if they ever did:

Buying a Directory Listing at Yahoo!

Last I checked, the charge for this is $299 (nonrefundable) for the expedited listing service ($600 for adult oriented sites). This is not cheap, and it is not for the beginning Web marketer unless they have a reason to be sure it is going to pay off for them.

Issuing Press Releases

This is another oft-mentioned Web marketing promotion technique. The problem with this strategy is that you must have something newsworthy to promote. Merely launching a website doesn't cut it. If the visitors to your site have achieved something noteworthy and you know about it, this could be a valid reason to issue a press release. However, before this happens, your site must already have reached a fair measure of success and traffic. After all, if you have no visitors, it is hard to claim that they have accomplished something noteworthy.

Participate In Groups and Forums Related To Your Niche

Another often-suggested promotional technique. While this advice is not worthless, and some well-known marketers follow this technique extensively, it can be an extremely time-consuming method of promotion.

The idea is to post helpful messages and include at the bottom of each message what is known as a "signature line" or "sig file" containing a short promotional blurb and a link to your website. This can help create credibility for you, but the number of people who see your posts will be limited to those who actually browse the forums you post on and view the particular thread that you participated in.

Another problem is that a surprisingly large number of forums do not allow links in signature files, even for posters who consistently give valuable advice and assistance. You must check each forum's rules before attempting this technique. This promotional technique can work much better in some niches than others, but again, it can be very time consuming.

Place Ads In Relevant Newsletters and E-zines

This can be an extremely valuable method of promotion, and it need not cost a lot either. Many e-zines with a fair circulation charge a reasonable amount for advertising. Many will even agree to trade ads with you if you have complementary but not directly competing e-zines with a comparable circulation.

Social Bookmarking

Websites like StumbleUpon, Technorati and Del.icio.us are all about trading links to useful websites. By adding your own website or blog to these sites, you can get valuable traffic, but watch out! Do it too much and you will be pegged as a spammer and be blocked or banned. Participate in discussions on these sites and you will be more likely to be seen as a productive and trusted member, but again, this can be very time consuming. It all comes down to a matter of choosing which method of site promotion is the most constructive use of your time.

What Doesn't Work?

Some of the methods of site promotion recommended in beginner's books and articles are extremely poor uses of most marketers' time and result in only piddling traffic at best. Methods such as printing out business cards, advertising on your car (unless yours is a local-only site), telling friends and family, putting your URL on your hat or T-shirt, or speaking to groups will result in insignificant traffic for most people. Of course, if you commonly speak to groups of hundreds or thousands of people, mentioning your site in your speeches would be a wise course of action indeed, but it isn't for most people.

Let's do the math. Say you get the opportunity to speak before a group and you decide this would be a good way to promote your website. Factor in the time it takes to prepare your speech (if you don't have one already) drive to the venue, wait for your turn to speak, give your speech, and drive back home. If your audience size is typical, you just spent two or three hours (not counting speechwriting) to promote your site to 50 people. In that same time you could have written half a dozen articles or more which would result in at least ten times as much traffic. Again, if you commonly speak to audiences of hundreds or thousands, this could be a good use of your time, and so by all means mention your site, but aren't we talking about beginners here?

Free for all (FFA) links pages

Some traffic generation strategies are even less effective. Free for all (FFA) links pages are nothing more than a rotating list of links. Mainly they are an excuse for the FFA site owner to send you an e-mail offering to submit your site to hundreds more FFA pages automatically for the low low price of $59. Of course, you receive confirmation messages from all these other pages as well. If you do sign up for an FFA service, at least be sure you use a throwaway e-mail address!

Banner exchange networks

These used to be all the rage, but they never worked very well. They often displayed irrelevant banners, they slowed up page loading times and they did not result in a significant amount of traffic.

Refer-a-friend scrips

Refer-a-friend scrips offered a piece of code that you put on your website that allowed visitors to fill in a form and send an e-mail to their friends about your site. Trouble was, the scripts didn't do much for traffic and were not worth the time and effort to add them to your site.

Link Exchanges

Finally, some people say that link trading is ineffective, at least for affiliate sites. Links to your sites on other sites might draw some traffic to your page, but the links you have to place in return will send an equal amount of traffic away.

Traffic generation is such a crucial topic that I discuss it, as well as the Mac friendly software tools that can help you achieve it, throughout InternetMacMarketing.com. With a little hard work and the help of your Mac, you can achieve good traffic by following the strategies recommended on this site and avoiding the time wasters.

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