Make your site know!

By Thuai Kam Goon
Posted Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Promote your site and start getting customers with these tips

So you've got your site up. What's next? Announce it to the world! There are so many sites in the internet today that webmasters have to constantly promote their sites and face oblivion. Listed below are the killer tactics that'll bring in the crowd.

Submit to search engines & directories (SE&D)

We usually take hold of yellow pages to find something. In the same manner, people turned to search engines and directories (e.g. Google & Yahoo) to find what they want. Effectively your site is listed in the first page of the top search engines. To be in the top requires lots of work - including optimization for your page. This is a vast topic by itself and will not be covered here. So the first step is to submit your site to SE&D e.g. (www.yahoo.com) (www.altavista.com) (www.dmoz.org)

Note, you need to read their terms and condition carefully and follow their rules in submission.

Advertise your site

Because of the immense competition, if you have the budget, the other way to go around being noticed in SE&D is to place an ad with them. There are various schemes - one of that is the sponsored links - e.g. the colorful boxes to the right in Google.

Trade Links

Another way to publicize your site (and to get better rating in SE&D) is to exchange link with other sites. The trick to exchanging links is to do so with related sites which already have high ratings. Type in you keyword and get the email of the top 100 sites matching your keyword. Send them a mail requesting for a link exchange. It is a normal practice that to be considered you will have to first include their link in your site first. Tell the webmaster that you have included their site and specify the link to that page in your email. Most webmaster will agree because it will improve their rating further.

Submit Articles

There are many ezines, newsletters and content sites out there that are looking for content. Tip: write a valuable article that's in demand and post it to as many of these sites with the request that they include the source. Prepare a brief write-up about the author (yourself!) and your website.

Refer-a-Friend

We are used to referring product/services to others and we trust recommendations by people we know. So why don't we make use of this in our site? It's simple; just add a simple script for referring a friend in your site. Tehre are various sites which offer this feature for free, e.g. (www.hotplugins.com). Let your present visitors recommend you. You can be creative and give them some freebies for doing so ;0)

Contest

Many people love games and contest. Put one up with attractive prizes. If your ultimate aim is to get more people to your site, make it like a lucky draw. For each friend they get to subscribe to your newsletter, they'll get a number. That increases their chance of winning. Even better, have a contest on who brings in the most subscribers!

Act now and start welcoming more visitors to your site!

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About the Author
Thuai Kam is a netrepreneur who has a passion in exploring creative ideas in internet business. She is the author of '8 Steps to writing your ebook from SCRATCH'. You can get business tools and resources from (http://www.homebizbay.com) and subscribe to free newsletter by mailing to subscribe@homebizbay.com.