8 ways to promote new content on your website

By Steve Nash
Posted Wednesday, October 13, 2004

After months of rebuilding your website - adding great content filled with profitable, keyword-rich copy (all due to Dr Ken Evoy's excellent 5-day Affiliate Masters e-mail course, no doubt) - your site is now ready to be uploaded to the Internet!

But how do you go about promoting this new content? Well, you need a plan!

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It's easy to receive Ken's 5-day Affiliate Masters e-mail course! Just send a blank e-mail to mailto:tamsshopping101@sitesell.com and get day 1 of this great course in your inbox TODAY! ===== Side Bar =====

WEBSITE PROMOTION PLAN

Yes, you need a website promotion plan! And you need a schedule for that plan. And once that schedule's finished, you need another, long-term plan - site promotion is never over! Some of the activities that you should plan to do are listed below; you can probably think of others, more relevant to your site: do!

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For a long-term plan, and some long-term activities, read my article called Promote Your Site Every Day!. You can find it : (http://www.shoptour.co.uk/webmaster-promote/promote-your-site.shtml) ===== Side Bar =====

1: TELL YOUR E-MAIL SUBSCRIBERS

Tell your e-mail subscribers! This is an easy first step to take, to promote a site redesign (or new pages on your site). Subscribers have been expecting an announcement, anyway, because you've been referring to the redesign in earlier newsletters (haven't you?).

This is your best opportunity to really go into detail about all the great ways your site has improved, and all the new benefits your subscribers will find. You could even (cheekily!) run a competition to encourage subscribers to visit your site, and find those inevitable bugs, before the rest of the web does!!

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If you don't run a newsletter, this is one (of many) great reasons why you should! Listbot, Topica, e-circle are just a few services that provide free, ad-supported, newsletters: - (http://www.listbot.com)
- (http://www.topica.com)
- (http://www.ecircle-uk.com) ===== Side Bar =====

2: TELL YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY, ANYONE

Tell friends, family and others who are (legitimately) in your address book. Make your e-mail personal, and friendly. And better still, just talk about how your site now benefits or involves them. That is, just discuss:
* your new link to their site * your promotion of their affiliate program * their new article, now on your site

Even busy friends and family, need to be 'encouraged'! Always focus on benefits, but *get them* to visit!

3: TELL THE NEWSGROUPS

Tell the newsgroups about your new site, but only do this if you are a regular contributor. Simply announce your site - check that site announcements are allowed, first! - with a few good reasons why members should visit! Better still, contribute to the newsgroup, and simply leave your URL as part of your 'signature'.

A great place to find suitable newsgroups is - (http://www.deja.com/usenet/) (now (http://groups.google.com))

4: WHAT ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES?

DON'T just blast your new pages to all the search engines / directories! This may seem like spam to them, and your new pages (or even your whole site) may get banned. This is because some search engines need to be told about new pages, others don't. And directories generally just like to know about the main page on your site (unless you've just added a lot of content on a completely different theme).

Search engine policies change regularly, so find out from others by visiting a search engine forum, or asking someone you consider to be an expert. An excellent place to find search engine advice is (http://www.searchengineforums.com) [HELP! and New Member Forum].

(So what did *I* do? I just submitted one new page to the major search engines. This page has links to all of the other new pages, too, so the search engine spiders should eventually index all of my new content. I visited searchengineforums first, obviously!)

5: DON'T FORGET PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH ENGINES!

Add more keywords to your various pay-per-click accounts. This is a great way to make new content available, quickly. (You just have to wait for keyword-approval by the pay-per-click administrators).

Choose profitable keywords (high demand, low supply), identified when you began creating new content. But, as you pay for each click, it's important that you only get clicks from your potential customers; so choose your keywords, title & description carefully.

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Don't know what Pay-per-click search engines are? They are search engines, like GoTo, that allow you to choose how highly your site ranks for a particular keyword. So you make a bid on a keyword. And if your bid is highest, your site features highest on that search engine's ranking, for that keyword. And for each click your listing generates, you pay the amount that you bid to the search engine.

Pay-per-click search engines are proving to be an excellent way to get extra traffic. Especially when you consider that results from GoTo, the main pay-per-click, feed into highly-placed sponsored links on many of the major search engines. ===== Big Side Bar =====

To learn much, much more about pay-per-click search engines visit this excellent site: (http://www.PayPerClickSearchEngines.com/)

6: FIND OTHER PROMOTION SOURCES

Search engines are not the only way to promote your site. There are webmaster resource sites, freebie sites, and even Britney Spears fanclub sites, all of which depend on new content! You name it, there's a site resource dedicated to it!

So use your favorite search engine to discover these resources, and check out their linking policy. Then, if possible, get a link! (You may even want to visit some of the links on the resource site, and get links from those sites too!)

With some persistence, this should bring you a lot of well-targeted traffic. (Free Sites, for example, get most of their traffic from one such resource: The Free Site - (http://www.thefreesite.com) )

7: WRITE AN ARTICLE

Writing an article (like this one) is a great way to promote your new content. There are so many sites willing to accept articles, and so many editors willing to publish them in their newsletters. Just write about your new content (but not about your site), making it interesting and informative to a general audience. Then, in the author-byline, refer to your new content, and provide a link to it.

For example, I found a great site, Find Sticky, just from reading an interesting article about sticky content, written by the site's webmaster. I enjoyed the article and checked the author bylines to see who wrote it, then visited his site - (http://www.findsticky.com)

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Don't know how to write an article? Just write about what you actually do, and the sites that you visit. Then read a few good articles on 'how to write an article', and compose away! It *isn't* difficult, and it can be very rewarding (not least because of the contacts you make with those that actually publish your articles!) ===== Side Bar =====

The following sites accept free articles for publication: (http://www.ezinearticles.com) (http://www.ideamarketers.com) (http://www.marketing-seek.com) (http://www.certificate.net)
(http://www.web-source.net)
(http://www.theukmarketer.com) (http://www.MakingProfit.com/articles)

8: GET VIRAL

Viral marketing is that elusive creature that can literally, *literally* create a STAMPEDE of traffic to your site; just on the continued recommendation of others. Think Am-I-Hot-or-Not? or Hotmail or Hampsterdance or ICQ or Napster...!

So how do you go achieve viral marketing?

Simple! Come up with a completely original, innovative, easy-to- use, easy-to-talk-about Wow!-of-a website... OR

Try one of these more common easier-to-achieve approaches: - allow visitors to create virtual greeting cards on your site - create free ebooks that include content (or articles) from your site, and then heavily promote the free ebooks - put free e-mail on your site - put 'recommend-this-site' links on your site - etcetera

Back to the article from Find Sticky. I actually found that article in a newsfeed from Moreover! It seems that if you write articles on a weekly basis, then it's possible to get your articles syndicated via Moreover. So, with no effort from you (apart from writing regular articles) you can get a link to your site (and your article) on hundreds, even thousands of other websites! (http://w.moreover.com/site/publishers/index.html)

As for Moreover - the newsfeed company - a link to their site goes on *all* syndicated content. Clever, eh!?

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Viral marketing brings more traffic to your site than any other method! But it's a lot easier talking about it than doing it!

BONUS: WRITE A PRESS RELEASE

Writing a press release is a good idea, but only if your site redesign *is* newsworthy - and only you know that! - your release will be pretty much ignored, otherwise. If you insist on writing a release, why not submit it to PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com). They check the releases before submitting them to interested parties. They'll reject your release if it isn't properly written (or newsworthy). They do all of this for free, too!

CONCLUSION:

You've worked so hard on developing your website further, with new content or a site redesign. And now you need to work just as hard to promote this new content! So get a promotion plan, and work through it, and then continually promote, promote, promote!

Enjoy your journey

About the Author
Steve Nash is webmaster of (http://shoptour.co.uk) - a new-look UK shopping directory: find shopping sites quickly AND save money. He also edits a newsletter called Promote! Promote! Promote! Subscribe by sending a blank e-mail to mailto:pppromote@getresponse.com