 Marketing Your Site
So, your web site is up and you're ready for people to look
at it. Now what?
Below are some suggestions on how to market your web site.
These may not apply to every web site, so pick and choose what
you think will work best for you.
- Issue a press release and submit to relevant
publications.
- Join a relevant newsgroup or forum and post an
announcement. Include a link to your web site with every
post you put up as part of your "signature."
- Email sites that are relevant to your site and offer to
trade links - if they post a link to your web site,
you'll post theirs. The more relevant the site, the more
it'll help your search engine rankings.
- Email sites and offer to write free articles in
return for having a link to your site on the article.
- Run a print advertisement campaign. Get lots of
postcards printed with your web site address and mail to
everyone who might be interested.
- Integrate your web site address into your existing
print materials, such as flyers, brochures, business
cards, and letterhead.
- Purchase banner ads or other advertising space on
relevant web sites.
- List your site in search engines and directories.
See below for more information.
Search engine campaign
Search engine marketing is a whole other animal... and a wild one at that! There are two facets of search engine
marketing that you should be aware of: pay-per-click
advertising and improving your search engine results.
Unfortunately there is NO "easy way" of getting your site to be
in the top results, so don't be fooled by the hundreds of emails
that you'll get from companies claiming to do this. We don't
consider ourselves experts in this area, but we have some
advice that we can give:
- Define your keywords. The first thing you should
do is to figure out what keywords you should focus on. This
will help you with determining what kind of meta keyword
tags to define and what pay-per-click keywords you should
buy.
- Consider pay-per-click advertising. This is the
quickest way to get results, but it may come at a price tag.
Pay-per-click advertisements are the small ads that you see
under "sponsored matches" at the top of Yahoo! searches or
"sponsored links" in the right column of Google. The current
high-profile pay-per-click advertising is usually done
through
Overture and
Google.
- Invest in a Yahoo! listing. If done correctly, a
Yahoo! listing is a great traffic builder and relevancy
boost. The registration fee is expensive (about $299 at last
count) and it can be difficult to get your site listed in
the correct category. Another drawback is that the fee
doesn't even guarantee that your site will be listed. Find
out more at
yahoo.com.
- Doing it yourself? Do yourself a favor! The
Planet Ocean Communications Search Engine Newsletter
helps you to stay on top of all the issues with search
engine placement. It's less than $100 for their book, 6
months of newsletters, the 6 next revisions and updates for
their book, and access to their archives.
There is also a helpful series of [free] articles at
www.pixelmill.com/support/a_se_1.asp.
If you don't have time to deal with search engine placement,
you may want to consider paying someone else to do it. You will
want to BEWARE of the many emails that you'll get advertising
"Top search engine results for $200!" Below are some
possibilities - we haven't used any of them before, so do your
research!
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