Methods I use to promote my sites
How to successfully promote your website
It is a known fact that promotion and advertising is one of the most time consuming and major areas of website development. Well today I’m going to show you a few methods that I have found to be very effective in generating traffic and interest to your website.
1. Social bookmarks
EVERYONE has started using this method now and rightfully so. Social bookmarking is a surefire way to get a rapid burst of exposure to your site and increase the interest level of your viewers. I have spoken about social bookmarking and social sites before so make sure to check out the related posts at the bottom of this page for some more detail regarding the topic.
Currently I have placed most of my efforts into three main social networking sites, those being Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter. You may notice that all three sites are quite different in what they offer and this is why I use all three.
Digg has been around for ages and is more of a “share your favorites with your friends” type of site, which is great if you actually have friends. The key thing to remember when using Digg is that you will only benefit from it if you have a large following of mutual friends. A highly effective method I have found to work is to add 1001 friends using a bot or otherwise and only keep all the ones that become mutual, then rinse and repeat. After that all you have to do is shout your submissions to all your friends.
StumbleUpon is a site I mainly use for traffic generation and views. Similar to Digg, it is much easier to prosper from SU when you have a larger friend base. Something you should do is interlink ALL your social accounts. I have discovered that SU is great for “gossip sharing” and by this I mean people posting your articles, pictures on forums, blogs and to their friends. The “send to a friend” option in the SU toolbar makes it easy for users to send your articles around.
Twitter has been said to do wonders in the selling and traffic generation circles. However, that is not what I use it for. Twitter’s main purpose in my eyes is to create a “following” of people who are actually interested in what you or your website offers. These people are then likely to click through the links to your site and become future subscribers. If you have enough people who like what you say you can get the same amount of free targeted traffic to your site within a few seconds that you would pay a hundred if not more dollars on PPC.
2. Niche related mini sites with auto blogging software
I don’t think many people have utilized the potential of this yet, so I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret. I’ve been doing this for about 3 months and the results have been unbelievable. Basically what you do is set up a little mini site using wordpress on a related niche to your main site. You then install an auto blogging software which in turn pulls interesting articles related to your niche from all over the web, it also includes a trackback to the other persons site and leaves it in the comments section.
If the article/picture/video is popular and that website is getting a lot of hits you will see that trackback link get clicked quite a lot of times, ergo bringing users back to your RELATED mini site.
So how does this help in promoting my ACTUAL site?
Well, I have seen some of these “niche related mini sites” get upwards of 200 visitors per day after the first few days of being active. What you do is leave the sites up for about a month and let them increase in traffic then all you need to do is redirect the site to your ACTUAL site and get all those TARGETED visitors to YOUR site. And if you have a few of these sites running at a time, that’s anywhere from another 500-1000 targeted visitors per day that will be landing on your site.
3. Forum signatures
This one is pretty obvious but should be said nonetheless, you need to join up on as many related forums and include a link to your site in the signature of your account. Try to get a few posts per day done in popular topics on each forum. Some forums will be dofollow and others will not, it doesn’t really matter because you are not doing this for SEO purposes but promotion and advertising purposes.
4. Blog commenting
When commenting on blogs you should keep two things in mind to maximize your efforts. First make sure that the blog is actually popular and has a decent following, there is no point in commenting on a low traffic blog just because it is “dofollow”. The second thing to keep in mind is that you should always try to comment on related blogs and articles, I realize that sometimes this is not possible, so in that case target VERY popular blogs and leave related comments with a link back to your site.
I find this comment template to work best.
[greeting]
[body, comment on the post]
[Regards,
Eric from [yourwebsitehere.com]
The main thing to take note of is the ending, a subtle way to mention your site in a comment is by making your regards section formal. To do this you can write [Your name] FROM [Your website], this doesn’t scream “promotion” but still lets readers know of your site.
5. Pinging
If you are running a blog you should set up a list of sites to “ping” everytime you publish new content. Pinging is simply defined as notifying a specific site whenever there is something new on your blog. Pinging spreads the word around quite quickly and ultimately gets your posts indexed much quicker.
You can update your ping settings from your wordpress settings > writing page. I decided to be generous and generate a list of sites you can ping, you can view this list here at List of Pinging Sites
6. BitTorrent
The basic idea of this is to upload popular torrents to torrent websites and leave a link to your site in the title, description and embedded .txt file. I wrote a much more detailed post on the subject which you can see here.
7. PPC Advertising
Even the best of the best sometimes refer to Pay Per Click advertising through services such as Yahoo Search Marketing or Google Adwords. The important thing to note when using PPC is to know your budget because otherwise you may find yourself losing quite a bit of money and not receiving any visible results. There are a lot of free books circling the internet with guides on how to succeed with PPC.
The following methods have benefited me greatly with my internet marketing and promotion endeavors and I guarantee if you take them into consideration you will see a drastic change in results.
No Related Posts
“[greeting]
[body, comment on the post]
[Regards,
Eric from [yourwebsitehere.com]”
Yes it does scream “promotion”, and a lot of people are annoyed by it.
What’s the point in mentioning your name and address at the bottom if there are special fields in the comment form? Yeah.. promotion.
Using the name of your website in the actual comment field actually gives it more exposure to the rest of the readers/viewers. If you use it in the name and website fields the the likelihood that someone view it is quite slim.
…And I was not doubting the extra exposure. I was saying that it can be a bad thing because it annoys people. Why does it annoy people? Because it’s obvious the info was repeated just to get more attention.
Yeah.
That’s why you shouldn’t include the url field but replace it in the comment field.
You know what I’m saying?
Really now… traffic from torrent sites ? What kind of traffic is that ?
If you optimize your torrents for keywords and aim it towards your niche market you can get quite targeted traffic. And it comes in HUGE cycles.
@Eric: not including it in the url field is even worst that repeating it
There’s a spacial text field in the comments form and a special field in the database table for a reason.
What if I wanted to display the 10 most talkative users on my blog in my footer with links to their websites?
Or another example: have you heard about a wp plugin called “Meet your commenters”? (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/meet-your-commenters/ )
To quote the description:
“When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is leaving more information than you think. This plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network.”