If you are new to website promotion, you may need to know how this works. First, you need to read, and then you write about what you have learned. I have found that there is definitely no shortage of information on the web. Take the information and put into your own words, your thoughts and feelings regarding what you have learned through your reading, and experiences and knowledge of your own. Sit down and write from 350 to 700 words about what you think or have learned in this process. When submitting them to article publishing sites for approval, make sure to add your website links in the author’s note, to link your website to other websites. Then when other website owners need valuable content to post on their website, you have gained the opportunity to put your link on someone else’s website. They go to the article publishing sites to find good content, and if they like yours, you get a free link. Easy, and free.

You can join a power linking forum and get a complete list of article syndication sites to submit your articles to, or do a search of your own. You then can either submit your articles manually, or pay an article submission site to submit them for you for approval. Since I want mine free, and have the time, I do my own submissions manually. Please take the time to correct grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure before submitting your articles, and be sure to read each sites rules for submission to insure your articles are considered for publishing. Some of them have some strict rules and guidelines, especially regarding where your links can be placed in the article. Most will only allow links in the author’s note box.

The next thing you need to do is set up a blog. This, too, is free and lots of fun! There, you can even post your very own personal journal. I have chosen to make mine about online business promotion, and post only articles about online businesses. Do a search for free blogs to find the one that is right for you. Post your articles on your blog. It’s easy and fun to do, with copying and pasting from a word document. You can also post your photos on your blog. To build your traffic, make sure you include a link to your main website near the top of your blog. The more content your blog has, the better the search engines love you.

If you need more content than you can possibly write in the beginning, you can use articles others have written on the subject you are creating for your blog. Article publishing sites are full of good quality articles on just about any subject you may want to choose. But you must always include the author’s note at the bottom, to give the author credit and the opportunity to have his or her link displayed on your site. After you have given your blog valuable content, you need to “ping” your blogsite, so search engine spiders will find you. This helps to build your traffic to your blog. Then due to your link on your blog to your main webpage site, you increase your main website traffic. I use “Ping-O-Matic” for mine. It gets submitted to many different sites at once, and very simple to do.

Next, you can link your blog to other blogs by joining a bloglinking site. You get lots of free traffic, and other bloggers leave comments on your blogspot, leaving a link, and you can link on their blogs the same way. Free, Free, Free Traffic!

The first part of gaining profits through website promotion is to have an excellent website design. You cannot expect to gain any profits through a website that is designed poorly or that is difficult to navigate. Make it easy for visitors to your website to find what they need and make a purchase. This will gain you fast profits.

The second thing you should do to gain profits is to use search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO has been widely used to put people’s websites at the top of a search engine’s list. It is found that most people that use a search engine only visit the website that is listed at the top of the list. This is why you need to use SEO to help with your website promotion. With the proper SEO, you can attract more visitors to your website. More visitors means more profits for you.

Next, to gain more profits you can use email marketing. Be sure that when you use email marketing to gain profits that you are not using spam. Use an opt in list instead. Have an opt in list posted on your website. An opt in list is when people request to receive email material from your website. It has been shown that opt in lists give a 40% increase in response. This means that you will again have more profits.

In order to gain profits through website promotion, you must be sure that you go after your target audience. Be sure that your website design attracts the type of people that would be interested in your product or service. Also, be sure that your email marketing sends out emails and ezines to people that will actually read it and have an interest in it. If you don’t, you cannot expect to gain profits.

Lastly, you can incorporate the use of affiliate programs to help with your website promotion. Have links to your affiliates on your website. Your affiliates will also do the same. With you and your affiliates working together to promote your website, you will start to see more website traffic and more profits.

Website promotion is the only sure way to gain profits for your business. Without it, you can easily find yourself in a hole that is hard to dig your way out of. Be sure to utilize all of these methods so that you can attain more profits.

Your website is now ready. It’s now the time to promote your website and spread awareness about your website and get visitors to come and view your web pages. Tips to get your website get going.

1. Page Title

Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many “filler” words from the title, such as “the,” “and,” etc. Mention appropriate keywords relevant to your website content. Remember search engines give this a lot of emphasis.

2. Meta Tags

Meta tags always go in the section of the document. META NAME tags include descriptions and keywords. This HTML code helps some search engines classify and rank a web page. META HTTP-EQUIV tags can indicate to the web browser how to display the page.

Write a descriptive META Tags. Many search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title. This sentence should describe the contents of the body text of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases used on this page. If you include keywords that aren’t used on the webpage content you could hurt the prospect of being listed in the search engine.

3. Linking Strategy

Link popularity is basically the number of links that point to your web site. Besides the optimization of your web pages for meta tags and search engine marketing and readiness, link popularity is considered as being a major factor for your ranking in the search engines. A large number of links that point to your web site will therefore improve your ranking significantly. Besides that, well placed links are an excellent source of consistent traffic to your web site.

Some of the important search Engines that consider link popularity as a factor for relevancy are Google, Excite, Lycos, Webcrawler & Altavista.

Linking strategies are an essential type of site promotion. The more links pointing to your site, the more traffic you’ll experience (and the greater perceived “popularity” will rank you higher in the search engines). To get someone to link to your site, you need to ask. The simplest way is to find complementary sites, link to them on a linking page, and ask them to link to you. The key, of course, is for your site to have content that so good that it’s worth linking to. Ask for links on sites that cover your industry, as well as from associations your business belongs to.

What is to be avoided here is link harvesting or just creating link database on your website of sites that have no relevance to your topic. Search engines have a negative rating for this.

4. Search Engine Submission

Now it’s time to submit your website to search engines. It is recommended never use automated tools, your website might end up never being spidered by the search engine. The best way is to manually goto the major search engines listed below and manually submit.

Google.com and Yahoo.com – A definite must. Over 90% of smaller search engines take their fodder from here.

Others to submit are Lycos.com, Altavista.com, Excite.com, Askjeeves.com, Wisenut.com, Toema.com & Overture.com

5. Viral Marketing

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

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Amongst the best forms of viral marketing are

Affiliate Programs

You signup and earn a commission per sale or referral. So you refer your friends and peers. When your peers signup their friends and peers you get an incentive for them too. What an excellent and automated way of publicity at extremely low costs.

Refer your friends

You just finished reading an article and suddenly remembered your friend for whom the article might be a valuable resource, so you simply email the article to them by using the “Refer-a-friend” link. An excellent and automated way of free publicity.

E-mail signature

Don’t underestimate the power of a innocuous email signature. You never know who and where it reaches. It doesn’t cost you a dime and gives your website free publicity.

6. Ezines

Write articles for others to use in their Newsletters. You can dramatically increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise and distribute them to editors as free content for their e-mail newsletters. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. This is an effective “viral” approach that can produce hundreds of links to your site over time.

7. URL on Stationery

This is a no-brainer that’s sometimes overlooked. Make sure that all reprints of cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company’s URL.

Beware of these promotion blunders

1. Spam

Spam or unsolicited e-mails don’t generate customers. They generate bad publicity and legal tangles. No website has ever made it big with Spam. Spam is like the scum in the gutter blocking precious Internet bandwidth, which brings absolutely nothing but abuses for their senders.

2. Abuse e-communities

While the former one is mass abuse, this one is direct abuse. Ecommunities are available on the Internet on probably every topic under the sun and e-marketers feel it’s a good place to deliver the promotional message. Right no doubt, but there is a Net etiquette for delivering such a message. Maybe in the form of a signature or participating in that community not sending stupid promotional messages which get nothing but bad publicity for the website.

3. Automated submission

Unless you want your Website to be blacklisted or removed from the database of the search engines don’t ever attempt it. Incidentally, the best and the biggest directory is human edited. Dmoz.org is the name; the same directory used by google.com, aol.com and other search engines. Manual submission to major search engines takes not more than a few hours and is fairly sufficient for meeting your e-business goals.

Well after these several years that I’ve been on the internet I too heard the call and have followed the many internet bandwagons that have rolled into e-town touting the next ‘latest and greatest’ snakeoil software to get one traffic that they won’t believe.

You know the cry… ‘The traffic explosion your favorite web guru gets – and it’ll only cost you $795 to attend this three-day conference to learn how to play with the big boys (and girls) online.’

Sound familiar? To most owning one or several websites it will.

But after being dragged around the reciprocal linking millstone over the last several months in a valiant attempt to obtain many reciprocal link exchanges and closely monitoring all completed link requests I can truthfully say that that job in itself is a bugger to track and stay on top of.

Why?

Because for the most part one has to rely on one common denominator in that equation… people. I finally realized that this tactic of getting traffic ‘for free’ and having it prove itself as viable was indeed true. Link-exchanges do work. But they ARE work too. But with me being the type of person who writes with my eyes closed (literally), I was told by a couple of e-friends that I should pursue ‘articles’ more vehemently. I didn’t know what they meant so what I did was find out about a couple of the bigger article directories on the Net and I submitted a couple of my writings to them. And then I promptly forgot about this process because it was extremely labor intensive.

And with me being a relatively lazy fellow at times I ‘moved on’ to other tasks that seemed more to my liking. And ease of use. But after getting relatively burned out with this link-exchange stuff and dogging real live people to honor link exchange requests after I had ‘nicely’ place an unexpected link to their site on my site, I was tired of this whole process

Yes, I know there are automated processes and software out there that will do this linking stuff for one, but again, I’ve also read how the SE’s are ‘onto’ these tactics and reciprocal links aren’t as effective as they used to be. But they are still effective, that’s why I still honor the odd link exchange request I get. I just don’t spend all my time doing this anymore. But getting back on track to the actual subject of this article…

Back a couple of months ago, I somehow received an email about a new software program that would do ‘article submissions’ almost automatically. But let me first digress somewhat and tell you what ‘article submitting’ is. Article submitting may sound kind of formal and only for ‘writers’, but it isn’t.

Essentially, anytime one writes something of extended length, even a longer webpage, they’ve written an ‘article’. Think about it. If you have a website that you’ve personally written, then you have written articles related to the subject of your website. So, if your website is all about the best way to burp babies, then you have a whole bunch of ‘articles’ that you’ve written about parenting, specifically, burping babies. What you can then do is submit these articles throughout the WWW and get yourself known as a baby burping expert.

But even more importantly, you can take each of the webpages you’ve written on your website and turn it into an ‘article’ – add a link BACK to your site in the footer of the article – and voila! you have written an article and ALSO obtained a link back to your site whenever someone else uses that article. And all this without having to hassle with e-chasing that non-compliant link partner to honor their link exchange with you.

Sound cool? It is.

Now, like everything else, there is a downside to all this article writing. It takes time to do. First you have to have written YOUR OWN articles/webpages. And then you have to personally submit them to any of several hundred article directories floating around in cyberspace. And of course there is the whole idea of you having the motivation to do this submission stuff too, so let me share a little bit of motivating statistics with you.

Remember how I mentioned earlier about having piddled with submitting a couple of stories/webpages I had written to several of the major article directories? Well, that was about 14 months ago. And remember how I told you that I did this and then promptly forgot about all this article submission stuff? Well, over those 14 months since I did this, which by the way only took about one hour to do, I now have about 300 STATIC, incoming links to my site from those two articles being posted around the Internet. Yes, 300 incoming, NOT reciprocal, links.

And so what I did was after I received that email from someone touting this article submission software was to do some research on this whole article submission automation software process. What I came out of this research with was that as of now there are two main article submission software programs that allow one to automate most of the process of doing this sometimes laborious task. And since it is so repetitive and sometimes painstaking to do manual article submissions I thought that this would be one way to get me back into this process that I think is well suited for the way I like to promote my business online. With words, that is.

After much mental deliberation, and financial detailing, I opted to go for an article submission software that was released during the summer of 2005. Besides it being almost one-third the price of the other main player in this article submittal software e-competition going on, it also appeared to have a lot going for it with a money-back guarantee and a manual and good developer-support. So I bought it several weeks ago and have been using it everyday to promote several of my websites by submitting ‘articles’ I’ve written to the several hundred article directories included in the automatic submissions this software does for the user.

And to say the least, the results, so far, are extremely impressive.

One little statistic. Remember those two articles I submitted 14 months ago and obtained over 300 incoming links from doing so? Well, I’ve used this software to continue submitting them to other article directories included in the software program. And now that 300 incoming links number now numbers almost 700. Yes, 700 incoming links from just those two articles. An increase of approximately 400 incoming links, in just five weeks. To me, those are some GOOD results. Especially without having to chase other humans to reciprocal link with me, building link webpages, tracking linking emails, checking links, buying tracking software, and all that stuff that goes along with the reciprocal linking process.

So, if you’re tired of buying links and chasing other website owners for reciprocal link exchanges, do consider using content you’ve written as a way to get links, and eventually traffic, into your site.

Written by Andre Best
President, Ultimate Results, Inc.
http://www.ArticlesandAuthors.com – THE Premier Site for Articles AND Authors