|
Your website needs visitors, that means you need to promote
your site to attract traffic. You have 2 general ways in
which you can do this - passive promotion, or active
promotion. As you'll see, passive promotion will give you a
greater return on your time and money - if you give it
time! Let's say you opened a dry cleaners. If you place an advert
in the paper, that is active promotion. You write and pay
for an advert, and people reading the paper that week get to
know about your business. If you want to continue promoting
your business in that way though, you need to keep renewing
your advert. If, instead of placing an advert in the paper, you put up a
permanent sign in the local town, that would be passive
promotion. Once you have paid for the sign and got
permission to put it in that location, it will continue to
promote your business for months or even years to come, with
no further input from you! Generating hits to your website can also be done actively or
passively. Active promotion includes things like PPC (Pay
Per Click), banner advertising, adverts on classified sites
etc. These all cost (either time, money or both) and last
for a limited time. They certainly work but you have to keep
working at promotion to keep getting the visitors. Passive promotion means that once you have an inbound link
to your site, it's likely to stay there generating traffic
for you, freeing you up to do other things. There are a number of passive online promotion methods: Reciprocal linking
Sponsoring other sites (paid for inbound links)
Forum signatures
Article submissions
Blogging Let's take a look at each of these in turn. Reciprocal linking A reciprocal link does exactly what it says on the tin! You
link to another site, and they reciprocate by placing a link
back to you. As other webmasters are also trying to get
traffic to their sites, there are always people willing to
trade links. They key here is to exchange links with quality
websites that are on topic. By that I mean sites which have
something in common with yours. There is little point in a
link from a site specializing in disco equipment, if you
sell hearing aids! Choose your link partners carefully and
build them steadily over time. Sponsoring A reciprocal link is great, but a one way inbound link is
even better. Once you have a visitor to your site you want
to keep them, you don't want them to click a link and head
off to see your competitors. Therefore one way links are
even better than swapping links with other sites. There are
plenty of sites which will link to you for a fee. Again make
sure you are getting value for money. Any site where you are
paying for advertising should be on topic, high quality, and
getting a decent level of traffic. Get some facts and
figures before putting up any cash. Forum signatures Forums can be very useful tools. While blatantly linking to
your site within posts will be frowned upon as spamming,
there are ways of getting traffic from forums. The key here
is to use a signature. Most forums will allow a small
signature at the bottom of your posts. In your signature you
want a very brief description of your site and a link. The
'secret' now is to become an active member of the forum. If
your posts are interesting and informative they will be
read. Try posting about things you know that other readers
will be interested in. Keep your posts on topic, reply to
other people's posts in a helpful way, and you will become
respected as an authority on your chosen subject. Whenever
someone reads one of your posts they will see a link to your
site. If they like what you've written there is a good
chance they will click on your link! Additionally, forum
pages get picked up by the search engines so use your
keyword in your posts and titles and you may also get extra
traffic from Google and the others! Article Submissions Like forum posts, articles you have written can have a
signature (otherwise known as a resource box) with your
link. Many people are scared of writing articles due to lack
of experience or confidence but it's really not that hard.
Just write about subjects you know well, and are related to
the content of your site. Aim for 1000 - 1500 words. Make
sure they are well structured, avoid the first person, and
include relevant facts and figures where appropriate. Once
you have written (and checked) your article you want a way
of using it to generate leads. You can submit to article
directories. These are websites which host thousands of
articles. Webmasters and newsletter editors can search these
directories and if they like your article they can place it
on their site, on their blog, in their newsletter etc. The
rules are that they must include your resource box and so
every time someone uses your article you get a one way link!
Again a quick search on Google will show a whole host of
article directories but try these for starters: iSnare,
GoArticles, EzineArticles, ArticleDashboard. Blogging Finally we come to blogging. Unless you've had your head in
a paper bag for the last couple of years you can't have
failed to notice the upsurge in the blogging community. A
blog is like an online journal, or diary. The reason they
are such a powerful tool is that by their nature they are
text heavy, and constantly being updated. This makes them
very popular with the search engines which like sites that
are fresh and full of textual content. It also means that
visitors tend to come back for repeat visits to see what the
news is! A blog is very easy to start and there are loads of
free online blogging tools. Just so a search for 'blog' on
Google and you'll find plenty including Google's own
www.blogger.com A blog will often get high rankings in the search engine
rankings and therefore generate a lot of passive leads.
Starting a blog couldn't be simpler, you just start writing.
Here are some tips though, to get you off on the right foot.
Firstly your blog wants to be on-topic. If your main site
that you want to promote is about 'home based businesses'
then that is the subject you want to blog about. Start
posting at least a couple of times a week about 'working
from home'. Write about your experiences and expertise with
working from home, about great home business websites you
have found, about changes in the law which might affect home
workers etc. The key is to write little and often, write
relevant and interesting posts that people will want to
read. It almost goes without saying that you want a link to
your main site from your blog, but there is an extra
advantage. If you write interesting and useful content on
your blog, other blogs and websites will link to your posts.
As your blog becomes well known as an authority on your
subject you will find more and more webmasters and bloggers
link to you, and therefore the traffic to your blog, and to
your main site increases! Passive vs Active These are a few of the ways that you can generate passive,
residual traffic and more traffic means more customers!
These techniques however take time. You cannot build an
established blog overnight. It will take time for your
reputation to grow on the forums you frequent. Your
reciprocal links will increase slowly as you build them. Use
these techniques to slowly increase your sites exposure over
time. Active promotion such as PPC and banner advertising
can give your site a quick initial boost while you're
increasing your site's exposure, but these passive
techniques will pay off handsomely over time. Most of these
ideas take a certain amount of effort but the reward is
traffic that comes to you - rather than having to be sought
out. Remember, there are no short cuts to anywhere worth
going! Bill Deakin is a web designer/developer/network marketer - Founder of http://www.kernoweb.com and webmaster of http://www.earn-ez.com Advice and coaching for building a successful home based business.
|
