Promoting Your Website 101

I built it will they come?

Promoting your site:

Press Release: Maximize the amount of publicity and free press by doing a launch party and/or circulating a press release. Identify various newspapers, magazines, websites, radio and television stations serving the market you wish to target. You may wish to hire a public relations firm or consultant depending on your needs.
Grass Roots efforts: bumper stickers, t-shirts, flyers, pens, pencils and the like are excellent ways of raising the visibility of your site. It helps to make sure that you have a catchy domain name (check www.GoDaddy.com for availablity) and an attractive and professional logo and design.
Use your email address: (info@yoursite.com) to send and receive ALL your emails as this will increase the visibility of your domain name each time your email address is spotted in an email that you sent, or among the many email addresses in a forwarded joke or chain letter.
Newsletters and E-Cards: E-mail based newsletters encourage repeat traffic, and are for the time being absolutely free to send. Several companies offer solutions for advanced email broadcast and management of lists including topica. An e-Card is a tool that allow visitors to your site to send messages to other members that also serve as a promotional tool to drive traffic to your site while increase awareness of it.
Link Exchanges: A page containing links to other sites is always a good idea. The practice of reciprocal links, exchanging links with other sites helps to drive traffic to yours. Search engines such as google rank your site based on relevance. In other words the more sites that contain the same topic as yours that are linked to yours, the higher your site will place in the Search Engines.
Search Engine Optimization: a good developer should not only design your site for appearance and functionality but structure the site so that it will rank high on the search engines.

By creating the right promotional strategy using a combination of these methods you will be likely to see a substantial increase in traffic to your site. Getting traffic is only half the battle however; maintaining traffic is the real challenge. The success of your site depends on repeat traffic and referrals and this can be achieved by keeping fresh content on your site. Would you read the newspaper every day, if it contained the same articles? A dynamic website is a solution that provides the owner with the ability to update information in real-time through user friendly interfaces. Sounds complicated? It isn't. If you are able to login to hotmail to check your email, you are able to update a well-constructed dynamic website. See our article "the difference beetween static and dynamic websites."