As webmasters and potential webmasters we all have the same on going challenge - generating quality targeted traffic to our websites. Site promotion is one of the webmasters most time consuming tasks. I'm sure the last thing you want is to be ill advised and unknowingly wasting your time promoting to useless or near useless programs.
I have listed some wonderful traffic generation programs here where you can waste hundreds of hours of your precious time - the end result in quality traffic for all your time and effort will be very few visitors or more likely no visitors at all.
- Join a "Guaranteed Traffic" program.
- Add your site to a "Web Ring".
- Banner Exchanges.
- FFA (free-for-all) pages.
- Submit your site to millions of classified ad sites.
- Submit to 120,000 search engines and directories.
- Join a Button Exchange program.
- Join a massive reciprocal linking system.
- Submit to the major search engines using "ranking formulas".
- Join a "Top Sites" program.
- Don't forget to join a Pop-Up Window Exchange.
- You could try a "Start Page" Exchange.
- And don't forget to join "Safelist" email services.
The major disadvantage the above services have is they can be easily cheated. It's not very hard to write scripts to reload or refresh pages creating false page impressions where no real persons are viewing the pages at all. To comply with the requirements of the services, ads are hidden or placed at the bottom of pages where they would be unlikely to be seen.
If you are lucky enough to get any traffic at all it will most likely be untargeted traffic - it's not much use having a link from a lonely hearts web site to your site when your site is about internet marketing.
Of all the services above the one I thought had the most potential was the safe list. A safe list is a database service where people join and agree to receive email from each other. The mail isn't spam as they have all opted in, and in doing so, agree to receive mail from each other.
The problem with the safelist is people join, then they set up a throw away mail account with Hotmail or Yahoo then send all the mail to these accounts. Some of these safe lists can have 12, 18, 24,000 members. Is anyone going to sit there and read your mail in amongst the other 23,999? I think not!
One thing I should make clear is that unfortunately, there are no 'Secrets' that the 'Internet Marketing Gurus' know that you are not privy to, but there are tried and proven techniques and strategies which will work just as well for you as they do for the Gurus.
To succeed at internet marketing or any other self employed business opportunity, often the first obstacle on the road to success, is ourselves. To succeed, we need to have a reason (or reasons) compelling enough to keep us continually motivated and focused, reasons that won't "expire over time".
Whether you would like to guarantee a secure future for yourself and your family, or you simply want a better life style, it's important to have a clear picture of the benefit you're seeking, and to keep this picture continually at the forefront of your mind while working towards achieving those goals.
The degree of success you can expect to achieve is in direct proportion to the strength of your own reasons. If you can only muster up enough motivation for one hours dedicated effort a week, whilst someone else can stay focused and motivated enough to work 12 hours a day, then guess who I'm going to put my money on achieving the success they both desire. "Input equals Output"!
Now that we have the motivation thing happening we need to look at promotion techniques that won't waste away the hours you ave decided to devote to achieving your goals. It's all well and good having the motivation and desire to succeed, so long as the time is invested in techniques that are going to produce the best value for the time invested. Positive results for your time input.
Submit your site to the search engines, I have written many pages and articles specifically on the subject of search engines. Getting your site right (optimized) for and listed in the search engines is the most important web site promotion technique available to any webmaster.
The first contact a potential customer is likely to have with your website will most probably be from a search engine. It matters little if your website is good or bad - if you're not listed in the search engines almost no one will be coming to see your site. Time spent getting your site optimized and listed with the search engines will be money in the bank later.
Before you submit your site to the search engines I suggest you go to:
http://www.netwealthgroup.com/se-promotion.htm
AOL Friendly Link
where you will find some useful tools to check your page validation and also see how your pages will look to the search engine crawlers or spiders.
Listed here in alphabetical order are the most important search engines to submit your site to:
AAA Matilda, AltaVista, AOL Search, ComFind, DirectHit,
Dmoz / Open Directory Project, Excite, Fast / All the Web,
Galaxy, Google, HotBot, Inktomi, Jayde Online Directory
LinkMonster, LookSmart, Lycos, Nerd World Media, Northern Light,
OneKey, Overture.com, Scrub The Web, NBCi LiveDirectory,
Starting Point, Teoma, WebCrawler, WebDirect, WiseNut, Yahoo.
I recommend submitting your site manually to all of the above search engines - some will penalize you if you submit using automated software, also be aware some of the search engines use meta tags while others, like Google, take little notice of meta tags at all, so you should make sure your pages are right for both types of search engine.
Another point to remember - some of the search engines place considerable importance on 'off page' criteria, meaning things like quality incoming links to your site, but don't even think about submitting your site to link farms in an effort to quickly generate incoming links because these links will result in very little if any traffic.
There are two ways to find quality websites to exchange links with, you can search the net to find websites that are targeting the same market, though are not in competition with each other. Try to create something unique that will make others want to link to your site. Or you can use software specially designed to automate this task like Zeus Internet Marketing Robot:
http://www.netwealthgroup.com/cgi/track/tracker.cgi?zeus
AOL Friendly Link
Publishing your own eZine and writing articles - writing articles isn't as hard as you may think. If you are connected to the internet you can access the worlds largest research library. I expect if you have a website, the theme of the website will be a subject or product about which you have quite a bit of knowledge.
Each day there are hundreds of eZine publishers looking for articles to use in their publications. Some of the larger eZines are mailed out to hundreds of thousands of subscribers each week. As an added bonus most of the publishers archive their eZines and articles online giving you a link for the search engines to find - another bonus for you the writer of the article, plus all the new subscribers who will sign up to receive your eZine because they liked your article.
Your article is like a silent unpaid salesman, selling you and your website 24/7. Imagine the power of this when you begin to get your articles published in numerous places all over the internet. If you're convinced you simply can't write your own articles, you can still publish a periodical eZine using other peoples articles which are relevant to the theme of your eZine.
This isn't the end of the benefits of writing articles. As you write your articles you are also writing pages which can quickly and easily be incorporated into an eBook, creating almost automatically another powerful promotion tool. You can then decide if you would like to give your book away free as a bonus or sell it, giving you yet another income producing product.
The final promotional technique I want to discuss is the use of affiliates to assist you in selling your products. Affiliates are paid on results and can be a highly effective advertising campaign costing you nothing unless the affiliate produces results. Some of the super affiliates are so good at their trade they can make a fortune online selling products for others.
The information above should give you ideas which will help you manage your internet marketing time and hopefully save you wasting hundreds of hours working with promotion techniques which often look good but usually turn out to be almost useless.
Not too hard at all is it? :o)
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