Before you begin promoting your website, take a close look at what you are offering other people, stand back and give your site an honest critique.
Here are some things you must consider before you begin promoting your website.
Are you providing enough interesting content to your visitors to keep them interested enough to return? All web surfers obsess over information that serves their needs and most web surfers fall into the information junkie category.
Before you begin promoting your website, be sure you have great articles, videos, links, tips, tactics, free reports or other worthwhile information for your visitors to keep their interest and insure they return to your site.
Free stuff will attract visitors like bees to honey. Web surfers act like children when something for free is offered to them.
If you don’t give your website visitors something for free; you are missing opportunities for building your list, generating additional web traffic and making sales.
Offer your visitors a free ebook, software program, “How To” email course, service or anything of value so they feel they have received some benefit from their visit to your site.
When visitors feel that they have received a good deal; they have a tendency to tell others about their deal. This word of mouth “promotional campaign” can spread, turn viral, and generate a substantial amount of web traffic.
Make sure the free offer relates to the theme of your website. You wouldn’t want to offer free marketing material to visitors if your website is about coin collecting.
Before you begin promoting your website, check your layout.
Website usability is important.
If you have a huge amount of graphics, compress and optimize your images so they load faster. Don’t use glitzy scrolling marquees, pop up windows, blinking graphics, etc. if you can avoid them. A pretty layout can be had without all this nonsense.
Match your background to your text size and color, so it can be easily read.
Keeping your layout simple without distractions will focus your visitors on what you really want them to look at. Your squeeze page sign up form, your free giveaway, your landing page link, or whatever.
Navigation should be simple, easy to find and easy to use.
Your visitors should be able to get to point A from point B without getting lost. If your site is large or has the potential of becoming large; create a site map to simplify access for your visitors.
Before you begin promoting your website you should have sufficient content already posted on your site.
In addition you should provide fresh content at least on a weekly basis to keep returning visitors interested.
Fresh content can be in the form of a video, an ebook offer, an announcement, or even just an update to your bio or resource page.
Make sure your site has correctly placed keywords in your Title tag and Meta description tag.
Meta tags aren’t used by all the search engines but for those that do use them, it will you will rank higher and it never hurts to use them.
This resource site will help you with Meta tags if you are unfamiliar with them.
http://webdeveloper.com/html/html_metatag_res.html
Avoid placing external links on your home page before you begin promoting your website. It’s not a good idea to send visitors to your competitors before you begin promoting your own site.
There are some basic NO NOs you should adhere to before promoting your website such as:
- Avoid using the words My, Me, Mine, Us, Our, and We in your text as much as possible. Instead use Your, and You. Your website is not about you, it’s about your visitors.
- Avoid using banners. Nobody likes them much.
- Avoid Logos and Awards on your site. Awards are showy and only useful to the search engines for checking link popularity.
- Avoid grammatical errors in your content. Spelling, typographical and grammatical errors reflect on your professionalism and tend to turn off readers. With the availability of word processors and spell checking software, there is no reason for these type errors to appear in your content.
- Avoid using frames. They make surfing difficult, require scrolling to read and activate links, and aren’t indexed by the search engines. In addition, many web browsers don’t support frames. Enough said?
- Avoid broken links on your website. They are unprofessional, annoying and frustrating as hell. They waste your visitors time and can drive them away from your site permanently.
- Avoid detailed explanations of the history of your company. Nobody really cares these days, however DO place your contact information on every page of your website. Your business name and address, your email address, your phone and your fax number should be visible on all pages of your website.
- Avoid uploading your website until it’s finished to your expectations. Never use Under Construction pages. If your website isn’t finished, don’t upload it.
Your website is the mainstay of your business and without advertising you will never succeed but before you begin promoting your website; make sure that it is complete, optimized, loading quickly, well designed and provides a benefit to your visitors.
The best bookmarking sites to use for a variety of content depends a great deal on personal preference however, after considerable deliberation and unbiased research, we have found that the following high ranking bookmarking sites provide the most “bang for the buck” with the search engines and with visitor traffic.
In our view these are the best bookmarking sites to use for HubPages, Squidoo Lenses, Blogs, websites, videos and just about anything else you care to bookmark online provided you add the keywords you want to rank for as tags.
- StumbleUpon has an incredible database of interesting links that are submitted by a huge network of users.When people tell StumbleUpon which websites they are interested in, they are barriaged with sites just by clicking the “Stumble” button in their StumbleUpon toolbar.
StumbleUpon uses the thumbs up or thumbs down ratings to create a consensus of collaborative opinions on website quality. Then when you stumble, only pages that your friends and like minded stumblers have recommended will be seen.
StumbleUpon has to be the ultimate discovery tool for content that you will probably never find using a search engine.
Search engine algorithms don’t pinpoint relevant content as well as StumbleUpon can. Typically search engine users often hunt through many pages of search results before they find the quality website that they were searching for, if ever.
On the other hand, StumbleUpon users are taken to sites that more closely match their personal interests.
Although StumbleUpon is not considered a reliable form of traffic generation; adding an interesting website, blog, Squidoo Lens or HubPage to it, will create a huge traffic spike that can last at least a few weeks. Plus, it can reach audiences that you otherwise would never reach.
- JumpTags is a site where you can bookmark videos, links, RSS feeds, images, HubPages, websites, blogs, and even a plain block of text.JumpTags bookmarks rank highly in the search engines and for that reason alone is a great way to get your website, blog, Squidoo Lens, etc. to the first page of the search results in a hurry.
The real power of JumpTags is how well they rank in the search results however, in order to achieve these results, you must tag your bookmarks with your targeted keywords.
By bookmarking your website or blog on JumpTags, you can often outrank yourself in Google.
- Digg is another popular bookmarking site that ranks very highly with Google.Like JumpTags, if you bookmark your sites on Digg, you can pretty much expect to have your site appear on the first page of Google’s search results.
- Lensroll.com is a Squidoo Lens only bookmarking site.It was created by a “lens master”, ranks well with Google and attracts many other lens masters to their links.
Lensroll.com has an AdSense revenue share that can earn you a good bit of money from advertisements, similar to your Squidoo Lenses.
Because other lens masters frequent Lensroll.com, your Squidoo Lens can benefit from better ratings and guest book comments that you normally would not receive.
- Delicious is owned by Yahoo and is a bookmarking site that will get you targeted traffic.Although many people believe that the more times you add your links to Delicious your ranking in Yahoo search will improve, there is no evidence to confirm or deny this theory.
There may be some truth however in believing that it can be an indicator of the quality of a site.
Delicious is still worth using even though it’s been some time since I’ve seen it’s pages in the search results. What I know for certain, is that it still generates web traffic.
The best bookmarking sites to use depends on your content and your personal preference however, the ones listed above will provide you with the web traffic you so dearly desire.
Try using Audacity to write your marketing articles if you have problems with your writing or if you just don’t like to write.
Audacity is an easy to use multilingual audio editor and recorder that can be used for a variety of tasks that could include the writing of your marketing articles.
Audacity is free and can be used with Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems to do an assortment of tasks, some of which are listed below.
- Cut, copy, splice and mix sounds.
- Record live audios
- Convert records or tapes into CDs or other digital forms
- Manipulate the speed of a recording
- Edit sound files such as MP3, WAV, AIFF and Ogg Vorbis
- Dub over existing sound tracks to create dual or multitrack recordings.
- Change the pitch without altering the tempo of a track
- Remove objectionable background static, hiss or humm
- Record directly from a microphone or line input source
- and more.
We all know that in order to win at article marketing, you need to be the most prolific writer out there.
Getting your content out there is what separates the winners from the losers and although you do not have to be a writing expert; you do have to be able to write a decent article. Preferable something that you can whip up in a few minutes.
- Your article must have a great headline
- People must be able to easily skim your article which means that you should have multiple subheadings throughout your article
- You should have catchy lead ins and tag-lines that grab your reader’s attention and get them to want to read more of what you have written
- Your article should contain bullets; this way your readers can easily skim your article and pick out the pieces they are interested in.
Many online marketers lack the ability to write their own articles simply because they haven’t learned how. Others shy away from writing their own articles because it simply takes them too long.
So what is the solution if you don’t want to write articles?
Speak Them!
With Audacity all you need to do is get a microphone, download a free copy of Audacity and you’re off to the races so to speak.
If you are not very good at writing, you can use the technology that Audacity provides to record your articles and then have an automatic translator type it into a document for you.
Once Audacity does the majority of the work for you, all you need to do is edit your spoken document and throw in some appropriate links.
Using Audacity to write your marketing articles is becoming more and more common, especially with the advent of “bum marketing”.
The process for writing your own unique article goes something like this:
- Find a keyword that you want to write an article on and then search Ezine Articles for articles on that topic.
- Once you find an article that is appropriate to your market niche, using your own words, read the article aloud into your microphone.
- Using Audacity record it, transcribe it, and then do a final edit.
If you are one of the many Internet marketers out there who have problems with your writing or just don’t like to write; try using Audacity to write your marketing articles.
