How to promote your site!

Site promotion gimmicks and traffic techniques come and go, but the ones that really work are those that stand the test of time. This article highlights what I consider to be the most effective methods to promote your web site of all time.

1. Get Your Site High In The Search Engines
Getting your site linked high in the search engines for your keywords and keyphrases.
One of the best ways to do this is to ensure your site has a good number of incoming links from quality sites - I discuss how to achieve this with relative ease below.

Also make sure that your site reflects the keywords/keyphrases that you are looking for - they should be in your title tag, your headline tags, and in your initial paragraphs. Don't however over do it, or it will look like "keyword stuffing" and you will do more damage than good - just make sure they are there in a natural fashion.
Don't aim for the most popular keywords, you will have a much harder time achieving success. Do some analysis using a tool such as WordTracker.com, and aim for keywords and keyphrases for which you have a fighting chance.

2. Create A Buzz
If your site offers something new and exciting, it creates a wow factor, and news about your site will spread far and wide with very little further effort on your part.
I stumbled on how effective this was myself almost by accident, when I created one of the very first popup generators online and added it to my first very amateurish web site. It was free for people to use, I did no promotion of it whatsoever, but people came from far and wide to use it, it was mentioned in many high profile ezines with large readerships, and it proved so successful that with some further development it turned into a piece of software that I still sell today on one of my sites.

3. Don't Waste Your Visitors
Every visitor that comes to your site is hard-earned - so don't 'waste' them. You want them to come back, to return time and time again. This will ensure your traffic climbs over time, rather than remains static.
First, ensure your site doesn't scare them away. Make it easy to use, visually appealing, and treat critical emails that you may receive from visitors from time to time like gold - while not all criticisms are valid representations of how the majority of visitors see your site, some of these emails can help you turn your business around if you listen in a positive manner instead of react negatively and defensively.
Secondly, try to subscribe as many visitors as possible to a list, so that you can correspond with them time and time again. Sending them news about your site for example will keep them coming back.

4. Pay-Per-Click Engines
Bidding for keywords on PPCs like Google Adwords won't usually bring you large amounts of traffic, but if you do it carefully, the traffic it does bring you should be highly targeted and therefore very valuable.
The trick is to know your stats. Know exactly what your sales conversion rates are per keyword, and how much investment on each keyword is viable for you.
For example, let's say your site sells artist pencils:
- If you are bidding $0.30 for the keyword 'pencil', each sale of a box of pencils brings you $10 profit, but if only 1 in 100 clicks for the keyword 'pencil' brings you a sale, you are spending $30 for each sale of $10, which is losing you a large amount of money.
- However, if you are bidding $0.10 for the keyphrase 'artist pencils', and 1 in 25 buys from your site, you are spending $2.50 on each sale that brings you a profit of $10, which is a profitable investment - i.e. it brings you a net profit of $7.50 per sale.
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5. Strategic Linking
This can be one of the most important methods to generate traffic over the long-term. Not only can you receive traffic direct from the links, the more links there are, the higher your position will tend to be in the search engines.
In my opinion, I've never found reciprocal linking strategies particularly effective, i.e. you can spend a great deal of time building up single links to your site, and as they are reciprocal, they are not as effective as the non-reciprocal links that the search engines prefer. The fact is that search engines know about reciprocal linking strategies, and reciprocal links only tell the search engines that you have a reciprocal linking strategy, not that your site is an effective resource that other sites are willingly linking to in a more natural fashion.
The following two methods are in my opinion the most effective ways to build up links, and concentrating on these can repay dividends over the long-term:

a. Article Submissions
The idea here is that you write an article that other webmasters and publishers can freely reprint on their web sites. Other sites and publishers desperately need content - you simply provide it. The pay-off for you is that to reprint it, they have to include your resource box that contains a link to your web site, and in the majority of cases, the link will be of the valuable non-reciprocal kind.
By writing your article and then distributing it as widely as possible, you can end up with hundreds of incoming links to your site from other quality web sites. This can be the most effective site promotion strategy there is.
(For more detailed information on how to do this, you can subscribe to a free course at http://www.takanomi.com/publish-articles.php.

b. Your Own Affiliate Program
With an affiliate program, people link to your site and receive a commission on any sales that result from their referrals.
This provides a strong encouragement for others to provide links to your site - the trick is to ensure the affiliate link actually links direct to your domain and not through a third-party site, otherwise they will get the benefit from the link rather than you.

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