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Promoting your site online

Article by Rebecca Case

As with any form of promotion - personalisation is the key. Your advertising and promotional efforts should be specific to your business and the clientele you wish to attract.

The suggestions below are based on what works for most businesses and personal sites. Take these ideas and work out which ones will be most effective for your industry.

Remember to achieve a balance between the online and offline website promotion. Ignoring one at the expense of the other is a risky strategy.

The advantage in doing online promotion is that visitors are already sitting at their computers ready to visit within seconds. It is far easier to convince people to visit your site when they are already online.

Yellow Pages (or the relevant business phone number directory of your country)

Promoting yourself through the Yellow Pages is not a cheap exercise, but it is very effective.

Most business phone number directories promote their own websites heavily. Searching for phone numbers of businesses in a certain industry is much quicker online, and therefore heavily used.

Paying the extra for your domain name to be listed with your phone number is definitely worth the expense. While your competition is only displaying their business name and phone number, you have a captive audience of qualified buyers to show as much information to as they desire.

As someone looking for a product or service, would your prefer to:

• Call each listed company individually asking the same questions of each?
• Get information instantly at any time of the day or night for free?

The answer most people choose is pretty obvious.

Links on other sites

Gaining links from authoritative external websites is a sure-fire way to improve the number of visitors to your site. Have a look at some of the leading online sites in your industry and kindly ask for a link from them.

If your site is full of top-quality content and is a valuable resource for the visitors of the other site, they would be adding value to their site by linking to and sharing their traffic with yours.

There are also many review sites that provide feedback to their visitors on the quality of external sites. Getting listed with review sites is normally fairly easy, but make sure you offer a product, service, or information that doesn't get a bad review!

Advertising on other sites

This method is significantly more risky than other suggestions mentioned here because it requires an initial cash outlay prior to proving the effectiveness of the investment.

Online advertising on other sites can be in the following forms:

• Pay-per-click
• Banner and text ads
• Site sponsorship
• Paid "reviews"

Determining which is the best method depends so much on your industry that we cannot provide even general advice on which method will work best.

Websites serious about exploring all forms of advertising will probably want to experiment with all four, and see which works best.

Search Engine Promotion

Search engines can be a handy source of "bonus" traffic. By creating a site that is useful for your visitors (and therefore the search engine's visitors) you can be sure that they will rank you highly and provide you traffic.

Relying too heavily on search engines for traffic is not smart, but there are some methods to help improve search engine rankings.

Email Newsletters

Email newsletters can have a negative influence on your visitors if done incorrectly, but can also have a greatly beneficial effect if done properly.

Using your existing client email database to provide information about your products, services, or advice, can spark the interest of your clients in an effective and useful way.

Just be careful to only send email information to people you have confirmed are interested, and have a prior business relationship with you. The line between an email newsletter and SPAM is fine, but very importan.

It is worth repeating that SPAM sent from our servers will result in the termination of your account. Make sure your audience wants your emails, and you provide a working opt-out mechanism if they change their mind.

See further general website hosting FAQs or our FAQ categories for more information.

Please contact us if you have a question that is not answered on our site.