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Launch Your Own Website – Part Eight: How to Promote Your Site on the Web

Written by kevin

Welcome to Part Eight of my article series entitled “Launch Your Own Website”

The series is based on my practical experience in launching my own site.

Part Eight takes a look at some basic ways of promoting your new site on the Web that all new Internet Marketers and bloggers should know about.

Promoting your site on the web is basically about building up awareness and gradually gaining backlinks from other sites back to your site so you can build traffic – and with that, customers.

Utilize free blogging services to promote your site

One easy and effective way of building up awareness and creating publicity for your site is to set up a network of supporting blogs. You do this by starting some blogs on the most well known and reputable free blogging services.

The most well-known such free blogging services are:

Posterous.com

wordpress.com

blogger.com

It’s very simple to open accounts on these sites and you can get a blog up and running on each of these very quickly. Don’t forget to include links back to your main website in the content you publish.

You should avoid publishing exactly the same content on these subsidiary sites that you have on your main site. The content should at least be modified first before publishing. This is because Google and other search engines tend to discount or devalue so-called “duplicate content” when they index sites.

TIP! Posterous enables you to distribute your content automatically to other blog sites!

Posterous is a blog site with a difference. It allows you to set up your own blog on the posterous.com site. But it also offers you the ability to distribute your posterous articles to other blog sites automatically. This is a free feature which I strongly recommend you utilize. You just need to set up your accounts on the other sites first and then authorize posterous to connect to these sites. You only need to do this once when setting up your account.

This gives you a quick and neat way to publish your articles on several sites in one go.

Don’t try to sell on the free blog sites!

The free blog sites, including posterous, don’t allow you to use their sites to sell directly. That means you should not include affiliate links nor advertising on your blogs on these sites or in the content you distribute to them. You should utilize them solely as publicity channels to promote your online business name and reputation as well as to gain back links to your main website.

Backlinks are vital to your blog!

It’s important to link and embed your site into the World Wide Web, so that people can find it and then come and visit. This is known as building backlinks to your site.

You create backlinks in the text that you publish on these blogs which lead back to your main site.

You should make sure you create three kinds of backlinks in the content you write for these subsidiary blogs:

1. Links to the URL address of your main site;

2. Links to the subject category on your main site that relates to the content material on your subsidiary blogs; and

3. Links to anchor text within the articles on your main site.

There’s another reason for building backlinks. The more backlinks – and quality backlinks – ie from reputable, highly regarded sites, that you can build, the higher your ranking will be with Google and other search engines – and the more visitors you will get from those search engines.

We’ve already mentioned utilizing free blog sites as a means to build backlinks to your site quickly. There are also a number of other methods.

Don’t buy backlinks!

But first a word of warning. One “quick and dirty” way that some people use is to purchase backlinks to their blog from a “link provider” service. These are companies on the net who offer you 300, 400, or 500 or more links for a small price.

I don’t recommend this method.

There are a number of problems with buying backlinks. First, you often have no guarantee that the links will be built. And even if they are, you don’t know for sure if they will do your site any good.

Are they reputable sites? Sites that value their reputation do not usually just let anyone else link from them. You also have no guarantee as to whether they will even be sites that are relevant to your subject niche and market.

Buying backlinks is a method that stems from the early days of the Internet and e-commerce. People used it as a short cut to getting publicity for their site. This has since been discredited by the search engines. Google now uses indexing algorithms which penalize sites that indulge in this kind of activity. If a large number of backlinks to your site suddenly pop up on the web, then the search engines algorithms tend to discount them and mark your site as a low-quality one.

So build your site back-links gradually and honestly and don’t try to hookwink the search engines. It never works. Or if it does, then it never works for very long. People who try to short-circuit the web in such ways only end up getting burned.

Use Article Marketing to build backlinks and publicize your blog

Article marketing is a reputable and widely used method by which you write short and relevant articles about your subject niche and publish them on special websites, known as “article directories”, together with a URL reference back to your site in the article.

Thus the article will serve a number of purposes. First as valuable extra content for the web and your audience. Secondly, as promotion for your site to attract more visitors. And thirdly, to help build back links to your site for the search engines to register and index.

Most of the article directories are free to use. The top ones are Ezine Articles, Squidoo and HubPages. There are many others, but these are probably the most well-known ones.

One important point about using article marketing. Each article you submit to the directories should be original and not identical to any others you have submitted. Don’t simply copy content from your own website. Make sure each article you submit is individually crafted. The articles do not need to be long. Indeed, long articles are frowned upon. Around 400-500 words is sufficient. And again: include your keywords – but don’t “keyword stuff”.

Also, don’t be tempted to try and use “article spinning” software. These programs tend to just take your original article as input and attempt to rewrite the article automatically using different words and phrases. There are exceptions, but as a general rule article spinning results in very low quality articles which are stuffed with keywords and make for poor reading for human audiences.

You don’t want your site and name to be associated with such poor quality content. Poor quality article spinning is the spam of the World Wide Web. Don’t use it!

Here are the addresses of the top three article directory services:

www.ezinearticles.com

www.squidoo.com

hubpages.com

There may also be specialist article directories for your particular niche that you should investigate. If they have a significant audience, then it may well be worth also publishing articles in those directories as well.

Configure Social Media for your site!

Another method which is now pretty well essential for every website is to have a presence on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

You need to utilize social media in a different way to how you produce content for your site. Generally speaking, your approach needs to be much more “soft sell”.

In other words, don’t bombard social media with sales calls, offers or “calls to action” or squeeze pages. People who try to do this quickly find themselves snubbed as spammers by other users of social media and it will just be counter-productive to your publicity.

Instead you need to take a more low key, informative approach where you are taking the role of providing information and advice and links to your site, rather than directly selling products or services.

If you haven’t already done so, go straight away to Facebook and Twitter and grab yourself an account. You can then create a Twitter feed as well as a Facebook Fan Page or Business Page for your site. These are quick and fairly straightforward to set up.

TIP! You can also install a WordPress Plugin which will tweet your posts on the Twitter feed for your site!

The Plugin I use for this is called Tweet This. It’s a free Plugin available for download from wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-this

Other reputable ways to gain backlinks are for example by leaving useful comments on relevant forum sites with a link back to your own site.

Don’t forget audio-visual media!

It’s easy to overlook the fact that the world’s number two search engine is YouTube. There are also other video streaming sites out there, but YouTube occupies the top position right now.

If you have some basic skill with video, or with creating webinars, or even just audio podcasts, then you can create and upload a short video relevant to your target audience. This will help boost your site almost immediately. Don’t forget of course to mention your website address in the video, in the video commentary text, or preferably both – or your site won’t get much benefit from your efforts.

Producing audio-visual podcasts is a whole subject in itself that I strongly recommend you become familiar with. A good starting point for learning about video is Gideon Shalwick’s site at gideonshalwick.com

Promoting your site is an on-going activity!

Finally a few words of advice. The web is continually changing, as new methods and ways of promoting sites on the web appear and others fall by the wayside. Promoting your site is a task that is never completed or finished. It’s a continual on-going activity, so you need to make sure that you keep working at it consistently.

Good luck with promoting your site!