Online Website Promotion – Top 10 Secrets Revealed

Just setup a website and having a hard time getting thousands of visitors to see your content? Wonder how everyone else is managing to do it? Don’t worry in this article I will reveal to you the top 10 closely guarded secrets that your competitors would kill to keep from you!

Choose The Right Platform

It is important to make sure that you have the right platform to start with, a flash site is not recommended as this will make it hard / impossible to get search engine traffic which should make up the bulk of your free traffic sources. The reason for this is that the search engines can not read the flash files yet so the content inside is not added to their database.

Whether you choose to go with a CMS (Content Management Solution) or a static webpage should depend on your web design skills. If you have the skills to edit the HTML code your self then you can survive with a static page but it would be recommended to go with one of the popular CMS system available for free on the web today.

These include, WordPress, TypePad, Joomla, Drupal and many others. I would personally recommend WordPress as it is the most used and widely supported.

WordPress CMS

When you choose a platform like WordPress to work with you immediately get lots of web promotion benefits included just from the features that come standard. The look and feel of the site is total customizable and adding new content is as easy as using a word processor.

RSS Feeds

These have multiple benefits as they can be used by your visitors to subscriber to and be alerted of updates to the sites content which can result in repeat traffic from returning users coming to see the latest article posted. The second benefit is that you can submit these feeds to RSS Directories which will not only build links (which will help with your search engine optimization) but also traffic to your website

Pinging

It has automated pinging built in, so every time you add new content it will alert the search engines and other websites so they can come have a look and update their information. Remember the search engines can’t send traffic to a web page they don’t know exists yet.

Tags

This allows you to assign tags which are keywords that you feel are relevant to your page even if they don’t appear in the content itself, this can help you rank in the search engines for a relevant keyword that you may not have ranked at all for before, they are also used by a lot of blog search engines and can send traffic in their own right so it is important that you make sure you include them.

User Generated Content (Comments)

If using WordPress comments come as standard you have the option to turn them on or off and even made comments need approval before being posted. But a long story short search engines like fresh content and having a web page with constantly updating content is sure to keep them coming back for more and in turn sending you more free traffic.

Free Methods

1. Search Engine Optimization

You may have got some clues to search engine optimization from the information above, it is basically the skill of getting the search engines like Google, Yahoo And MSN to give you free traffic.

There are two different types of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in my opinion and these are:

On Page Optimization

This includes things that make your website relevant for certain key phrases, making sure your target keywords appear in the main content, in your tags, titles, and in the url will help a lot with your ranking for any of those given keywords

Off Page Optimization

This is mainly about link building, search engines see other sites linking to you like a vote for your site, the more votes (links) the higher your site will rank.

You can get links from all kinds of places as discussed above submitting your RSS feeds to RSS Directories is a good start, you can also look into article directory’s, web directory’s, social bookmarking and a whole load of other stuff. This is a rather simplified version of SEO (search engine optimization) it is a lot more complicated than this but is beyond the scope of this article.

if you want more information about this, I have a rather detailed description in day 2 of my free 5 day e-course, see the bottom of this articles for more details on how to enroll.

2. Article Syndication

This is a very effective method for getting links and traffic. If you use high quality content you will tend to find that the traffic is very targeted and converts very well compared to other traffic. The reason for this is that the prospect has been pre qualified.

They have found your article to be of interest to them and have read the whole thing and when they get to the end and see the link to your site for more information and have clicked it, if at the other end you are offering something else of value that complements that information they are much more likely to buy than if they have just come across your site in the search engine.

The other advantage of using article sites is that they have a very high standing in the search engines already so you are able to rank well for keywords that would take a long time and a lot of work to make your website rank for. But wait this is not all there are more benefits to article marketing:

Web Masters

Will use article sites to look for new content to post to their own site, they are allowed to use articles posted to this site as long as they include your resource box which will include your marking message and website link. So not only will you get a link back to your site that will help with SEO but you will also get traffic from visitors to their site clicking the link to visit yours

eZine Publishers

If you have done a good job of publishing quality content then you can really hit the jackpot with this one. If an ezine (online newsletter) decides to publish your article you can get hundreds even thousands of visitors in under 24 hours .

So what sites should you post your articles to? There are literally hundreds of article directories that you could choose from but the 3 biggest ones are ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and articlebase.com.

3. Web 2.0 Syndication

There are many web 2.0 sites that allow user generated content that you can syndicate your content across these include sites like, Squidoo, Hub Pages, Wet Paint, Blogger, Wordpress.com and many more. These sites rank well in the search engines on their own, but you make them perform even better if you get some links to them.

All these sites mentioned have RSS Feeds, remember the submitting to the RSS Directories trick I mentioned at the beginning well you can do this on these sites no problem, if you want to a more concise list of RSS Directory sites then I have a list on day 2 of my free 5 day e-course you can find more information on how to get this at the end of this article.

The next step would be to get a load of social bookmarking links to these pages. You should be able to get a least 50, you can get even more if you want to find them all, again if you want the list I use its on day 2 of my 5 day e-course. The other interesting strategy you can use here is a link wheel by linking all the web 2.0 pages together.

4. Social Media Marketing

You can also use methods like setting up MySpace pages Facebook Groups and Bebo pages to get traffic. As well as social networking tactics.

5. Classified Ads Sites

There are hundreds of free classified ad sites springing up all over the internet the biggest of these is Craigslist next in line is Backpage and Gumtee is leading in the UK market. This can be a good place to get some free traffic I have a rather extensive guide to posting on Craigslist on day 4 of my free 5 day e-course as this is the hardest one to post to, you will also find a concise list of “Classified Ad” sites you will find details on how to get my e-course at the bottom of this article.

List Building

The most important part of having a successful website is to build a mailing list, so that you can direct subscribers to new content and make offers to affiliate programs and joint ventures to make some extra cash if your doing any kind of paid advertising then this should be directed at building a list. Read on for the paid advertising methods chapter.

Paid Methods

6. Pay Per Click

You can use search engine pay per click services such as Google Adwords, Yahoo and MSN to drive traffic to your website, these services allow you bid on search engine keywords and have your ad appear next to the normal search results in the sponsored section.

These can be a fantastic way to get more traffic to your website but there is another secret trick here, because you can also use it to find out what keywords convert best for your website and once you know this you can optimize your website to for these keywords.

7. Pay Per View

These are services that allow you to buy pop up ads, some of the companies that supply this service are Media Traffic, Traffic Vance, Adon Network, Clicksor, Pin Ball Publishing Network (was called Zango)

8. PRWeb

This site allows you to submit press realises that can get syndicated to media outlets like newspapers and TV stations and magazines, these need to be very professional if your not up to the task of writing it may be an idea to hire a writer for this task, as PRWeb charges a reasonable amount for a submission.

9. eZine Advertising

This involves finding internet newsletters that will allow you to advertise and placing adverts inside them this can be a very responsive and cost effective way to market your website if you have chosen the right ezine. There are different types of adverts you may offered, here are some of them and what they do.

Solo Ad

These cost approximately around $10 per 1000 subscribers and it is a standalone mailing that is dedicated to your offer only. You type out the email and they send it to their list.

Sponsored Ad

This is where you appear at the top of an article that is sent out in the newsletter with your message and link.

Classified Ad

These are usually at the bottom of the newsletter, they have less exposure and are quite cheap to purchase, despite their handy cap, these can sometimes be the best ROI (return on investment) for promoting and opted in page for your own list

10. Co-Registration

These are usually arranged by a 3rd party the basic concept is that person A subscribes to a newsletter on a website belonging to person B the whole thing is organised by Person C (the co-reg network) when person A subscribes they are subscribed to 5 newsletters at one time all on the same topic but slightly different niches of that topic to avoid direct competition.

So person D, E, F, G, H whose newsletters person A subscribed to pay person C a fee for every subscriber this can be between $0.10 – $1 per lead depending on the network and many other factors. Person C then pays person B his commission for getting the subscriber.

This is co-registration its not as responsive as normal opted strategies but the prices are a lot cheaper and it can drive huge volumes of traffic to your website and offers.