I hoped that you enjoyed your little break – now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work!
Step Six - With your promotional resource kit in hand, visit all of the major search engines and add your site’s URL to the database, remembering that each search engine is different. Only add one page’s URL in any twenty-four hour period; you don't want to be perceived as spamming the search engines. In one to eight weeks time, your Web site will start to show up in the search results.
Step Seven - Almost every Web site owner will find that most visitors to their site will not actually come from search engines, they will come from links with other Web sites. Finding sites that are prepared to link with you is not as hard as you might think. As a guess you already know who your main competitors are, find out their URLs and write them down. Next visit a search engine such as Infoseek and enter "link:http://www.example.com" obviously changing the URL to that of your competitors. This will then give you a list of Web site owners that are already linking to your competitors site. What you then need to do is to visit each of these sites and see if the Web site owner is prepared to link to your site.
An introductory email could go like this:
Hi
We have just visited your Web site and we liked it so much that we thought we'd ask if you could review our Web site to see if it warrants a link from a site as good as yours. We particularly like…
Our site covers (insert your twenty five word description here)
Thank you, all help in promoting our site is appreciated.
Regards
Name
Tag line 1
[Insert Your Web site URL]
Link banners can be found at [Insert the URL of the page with your banners and button links]
As you can see, the email grovels a bit and praises a little, people like nothing better than a little praise regarding their Web site. The email gives good concise information which doesn't take too long to read, and it gives a link to the page on your Web site which contains suitable link banners and buttons should the recipient of the email require these to link back with.
Step Eight - A good signature file is essential to the promotion of your Web site. The signature file goes at the end of all your emails, not only making your emails look a little more professional but helping to bring in visitors.
Step Nine - It's off to the newsgroups now, I would suggest reading and reviewing each particular newsgroup message threads before attempting to post any messages as each group works by a set of rules, learn these rules first, they are often posted at the beginning of each month. Once you understand these rules, try asking / answering a few questions make them relevant to the newsgroup and include your signature file for some free advertising, much like all your emails include this signature file with all postings you make.
Step Ten - Use your existing stationary to promote your Web site, add your URL to your business cards, your company letterhead and even your company brochure. Indeed some business have it mentioned on company cars and even on billboards outside of their offices.
Step Eleven - Another free way of attracting visitors to your site is to join a banner exchange scheme. This works on the principle that if you show a certain numbers of banners on your site, other members will show your banner a certain number of times. For example, many banner exchanges work on a 3:2 ratio, meaning that for every three banners shown on your site, your own banner will be shown twice on other member’s sites. The banner program automatically keeps track of all banners shown, the number of times your own banner has been shown, and the number of times people have clicked on it, along with a few other details.
Step Twelve - Oh you thought there where only ten steps. Well there are actually no set rules, as the Internet is constantly changing, and so should your strategies and tactics and always remember the job of promoting your Web site is never complete, so I guess its back to step one whenever you are ready.
