Promotion Pays Off !

By Richard Male

One of the biggest steps in building a website is promotion. Without this, who will know about your site? There are many ways to promoter your new site, online or offline. Here is a list of some of the best ways to get people to your site.

_Yahoo!_

This is the first place you should go. It's one of the biggest and most widely used search engines on the web. Getting your site listed here may take some time and plenty of patience, but it will be worth it in the long run.

_Other Search Engines_

After submitting your information to Yahoo! you should do the same at the other major search engines. You can find a list of some of the most popular ones at
http://www.angelfire.com/ny4/htmlgrabbag/search.html

Although you will probably get better results by going to each site separately, there are many sites that will submit your site info for free to the most popular search engines. This is not the most reliable way to get listed, but it may be a good
start.

_Newsgroups &Message Boards_

This is a great way to get your site noticed if used right. Remember that people won't look at your message if it looks like an advertisement. A way that I have used to get people to visit my site is to answer peoples questions and include a link
back to my site so that they can get more information. Just be sure to do this on boards that is about the same subject as your sites conten
_
Chat Rooms_

Another way is to join in on a chat topic and if the subject is about something that you offer on your site you can direct the chat group there. This is another place where you should be careful not to spam. Some chat rooms even have a feature that
lets you have a small graphic next to your user name. You can try putting a small button advertising your site.

_Trade Links_

Find other sites that have similar content as yours, even if they are your competition, and offer to trade links. This will bring in visitors to your site that otherwise would not have known about what you have to offer. This could also help with
search engine ranking with some of the sites that use link popularity when listing the sites. The more sites that link to yours, the better position you'll have in some search engines.

Promotion is one thing that you will never be done with. You need to get your message out in as many places as possible as often as possible. That means you have to be persistent.

Check the search engines regularly and resubmit when necessary.
Visit the message boards, chat rooms and news groups on a regular basis.
Trade links whenever you can.

Getting people to visit your site takes a lot of work, but if you use the tools available, you should have plenty of hits on your site in no time.
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