Web Site Promotion 101

This article covers basic site promotion techniques that belong in every web masters bag of tricks. You do not need a professional SEO to boost your traffic to your target market if you just exercise some good common sense judgment using the self promotion techniques listed here. This article does not promote illegal methods of traffic building nor any techniques here that who's legality is questionable in your area.

So what can you do to give your site a boost to promotion with just a little bit of effort? Nothing! If you want to do just a little bit of work and make a lot of money doing it try going to Las Vegas because if you are not serious about how you run your site, people will not take you as a professional. You need to fit the part you are trying to sell your self/ content as.... so do it and quit whining.

To those of you that really care about your web site and you have solid goals to accomplish with it this information is for you. Promote your site by doing one or more of the following:

Create an "Opt In" Newsletter: Nothing gets your ideas and commentary out like a consistent news letter of great and interesting articles your sites visitors like to read.Start with monthly or quarterly issues because quality is much more important than quantity in the eyes of your viewers.
Advantages: Visitors will come to your site to read your great articles or the archive of articles you have. This will build your credibility as both an expert in the topics you discuss and as a consistent and established member in the web based community.
Disadvantages: You have to build and maintain the opt in list and come up with great content and articles that your audience consistently likes or you will become another junk mail e-zine. If you are not consistent or if your commentary is poorly researched you and your site will take flack.
Tough Work: Requires maintaince and software (which you can write to automate some work). Constant fresh content is a must.

Banner/Link Exchange: Create small but interesting banners that are linked to your site which others are willing to put on their sites. More or less it is trading some of the virtual real estate you have on your web site for a portion of potential traffic.
Advantages: Cheap (or free) and effective if you are selective with the sites that host your links/banners can be a major boon to your site. If you give away something like a script others can use on their site you can obligate them to give you a link as the only price.
Disadvantages: No matter how good some content on your site is no one will stick around to find it if your site is cluttered with adds and links to other web sites. Also affiliation with some sites may create a negative reflection on your site. If your affiliates have no traffic, they will have nothing to offer your site but clutter. Several ad blockers used prevent these banners from loading.
Tough Work: Making a classy yet eye catching banner that is small for low bandwidth usages is a challenge. The idea is to get people who are interested in the target content not just a lot of people in general. Targeted visitors usually will return later and pay attention to your site while others will be annoyed at the "false advertising" you offered them.

Search Engine Rankings: The wonderfully crawling and searching programs that spider the web to create vast directories can be harnessed to drive people to your site in no time.
Advantages: Near immediate traffic can be generated for keywords related to your site with the right amount of cash. Free crawls take a couple weeks to start showing up.
Disadvantages: This usually means shelling out a lot of cash on a regular basis for high rankings on key words in search engines for higher placement and hours of tweaking your web site. There is also extreemly high competition among popular keywords which may mean at best you would be ranked at 50-250 unless you put down serious cash.
Tough Work: Optimizing your entire web site to become search engine friendly. Finding the right keywords can be a headache.

Promotional Gifts: People always like getting free stuff or winning perceivably expensive merchandise. Be sure that the item or prizes you give away have value to the target audience of your web site to boost traffic.
Advantages: The whole idea of stopping in to get gas at a gas station and leaving with sodas, chips, and candy too. People may come at first for the carrot you dangle by them but will keep coming back if you always have good things to offer.
Disadvantages: Just having really good things for free at realalistic odds of winning is likely to attract people to enter to win, while they will continue to care less about your site. Sometimes you are left just giving money away and wasting bandwidth.
Tough Work: Devising prizes that ionize your site and forking out cash for it. A bit of software can easily handle entry management and display winners.

Word of mouth & traditional advertising: Never forget that you can always use traditional old school venues to get people to look at your web site. The reason they are still around is because they are still effective.
Advantages: Usually more effective to get a nicely hand written letter and brocure/business card with your site, name, and logo (if professionally done).
Disadvantages: Generally more costly and slow (except by word of mouth) to see a turn about in your investment cost benefit ratio.
Tough Work: Varies with the method of delivery. Word of mouth requires you to be charismatic and professional looking while others require advanced graphic or copy writing skills.

Don't get hung up with the suggestions listed here on how to promote your site. These are only the ABC's of marketing and advertisement that can be used for any business or individual. Ideally you should try out as many venues as your time and budget allow and see what is the most profitable and effective for you.