Starting a new website isn’t easy. You have to get a layout designed, code that layout, and of course fill the site with some type of content. After you have that done you need some way of getting people to your website. Promoting a website might be as hard as actually getting a website started. There are tons of ways to promote a website. I will be going over free ways to promote a website, and ones that cost money. We will start with free ways to promote a site.
Link Exhange – This is one of the easiest ways to promote your website. Although it might not bring you a ton of traffic it will help out. With any website you start there will be others like it, or in the same category. A lot of these sites will have some type of link exchange or affiliate list. Just e-mail the site and most of the time they will be more than happy to exhange links.
Newsletter – A newsletter is a great way to get traffic to your site, especially if you update it a lot. Of course you need people to signup for the newsletter. There are tons of free newsletter software or you can even just have a form where someone puts in their e-mail and it mails you. You can have a daily, weekly, or monthly newsletter. It will bring people back to your site because they are reminded of your site/content.
News Mailing – This is one of my biggest helpers on ThinkComputers. Each time I post a review I send a news mailing out to all of my affiliates. They in-turn will post the news on their website. Now I know most tech related sites do this, I’m not sure about other type of site. These news mailings make up about 40% of my traffic for ThinkComputers.
Signatures – On many online forums you are allowed to have a signature. Usually when I signup on a forum I put a link back to ThinkComputers in my signature. This will not create a lot of traffic, but as I have always said every little bit helps.
So those are some of the free ways to promote your site, let’s see what money can buy!
Banner Advertising – Banner advertising can be purchased on a CTR, CPM, or flat rate. It all depends on who you are dealing with. I have never bought banner advertising from third party advertisers like Google or Yahoo so I am not that familiar with how they work it. I have bought banner advertising directly from some site. I have seen mixed results, it all really depends on where the ad is located.
Text Link Advertising – This type of advertising is becoming extremely popular. You will see on many sites a set a random links on the side. These random links are Text Link Advertising. I have worked with a few companies on this type of advertising and have got very good results. Out of all the paid advertising I would go with this one for sure.
In Text Advertising – I’m sure if you have been to ThinkComputers you have seen this type of advertising. On every page you will see some text double underlined. When you hover over it, it will bring up an advertisement. I have never used this type of advertising to promote anything, but the 2 biggest In-Text advertising companies are Vibrant Media and Kontera.
Buy Forum Posts – If you are starting a forum this is a great way to promote it. There are many companies that you can pay to post on your forums. And it’s not like they are posting spam, they are actually posting relevant information. I have never tried this, but I might for the ThinkComputers forums.
Well I hope this post is helpful to some people. When I first wanted to promote my websites I really had no idea what I was doing so this is some of what I have learned over the past year. Thanks for reading!