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The Guide To Promoting Your Web Page
by John Hawkins
Because of web-based tools like Blogger & Movable Type, creating a web page is easier than ever. Because of those new tools and the rapid growth of the web there are literally millions of people creating new web pages every week. Perhaps the biggest challenge these people have to deal with is, "how do I let all of those billions of people out there on the web know I exist?"
Well perhaps I can be of some assistance. I've been running web pages on the net since 1999 and I've had some success. Brass Knuckles Webzine averages around 2000 daily uniques per day and Right Wing News averages about 1000 daily uniques per day. I'll grant you that I'm not anywhere near as big as powerhouses like Fark or Andrew Sullivan but I have moved passed that 50-200 daily uniques nether region that most web sites never manage to pull out of. So I can't teach you how to become one of the web's biggest sites but I can teach you a few tricks that can get your page in front of a lot more eyeballs.
Buying Advertising: The average person can't afford to buy a massive advertising campaign but there are a few options that people can afford even on budget. Personally, I've probably bought advertising from a dozen different sources on Ebay over the years.
If you buy banner ads keep in mind that your click-through rate is probably going to be around 1%. That means a million banner ads will probably only bring 10,000 people to your web site. I've had my best success with pop-under ads (on Ebay you can get about 100k of those for around $25). Although they may be annoying, they are also effective. I'd strongly recommend that you stay away from any type of spamming however. The headaches it'll cause for you probably aren't going to be worth the traffic it brings in.
Link Trades: To trade links, you simply find a web page you like, acquire their email address and then email the author of the page asking them if they'd like to trade links. This is an excellent way to increase your traffic because not only will you get more traffic from the link, but it will make the people you link more likely to link things off of your page. The majority of people who I've approached about trading links have been agreeable but don't be surprised if some of your emails are ignored or even if you get an unhappy reply or two. You will occasionally run across someone who feels insulted by this sort of thing, as if their material is not good enough to link unless there's a trade involved. These people are by far in the minority but I thought you should be aware that you will occasionally run into them.
Linking Other Pages: Linking other websites will help you get bigger. That's because it increases the value of your page to your readers by giving them more content than you alone can provide and because it will get YOU linked. Personally, I've linked countless numbers of pages that I learned about because they linked me first. Most webmasters check their statistics regularly and if they see a link from a new place they go to check it out and see what was linked. Furthermore, since it's flattering to be linked, many of these pages will be much more likely to link something they find entertaining on your page as a thank you than they would been otherwise.
Promotional Emails & Link Submittal: Look for pages that link the type of information you have on your page and shoot them an email or submit a link (if they have a way to do that) telling them about articles of interest on your page.
This can be a little trickier than you think. If you submit information too often then they'll automatically delete your email without paying attention to it. They'll also lose interest in your emails if you consistently submit non-interesting things or if you submit material that doesn't really fit with the pages you're submitting too. As a general rules of thumb you might want to keep the number of promotional emails to two or less per week and you'll want to make sure the articles you're promoting are exceptional.
Search Engines: The only two search engines I've ever gotten a significant amount of traffic from are Google and Yahoo (which uses the Google engine). Just tp drive that point home, here are the three search engines that have sent me the most traffic on Brass Knuckles Webzine in the last two years along with their hit totals: Google 77,473 Yahoo 47,716 & MSN 2,672.
There are services that claim to be able to improve your search engine ranking but common sense will tell you if tens of thousands of people are all buying the same service everybody can't be at the top of the list. The one time I paid a service to do this didn't produce even one hit for my page as far as I could tell. Keep that in mind before you spend any money on it.
There are sites out there that will allow you to submit your page to some of the more popular search engines for free. Examples of this type of service arehere, here, & here. Keep in mind that it may be months before many of these search engines start regularly accessing your page and even when they do it's unlikely that a flood of traffic will be the result.
Top Referrers: Every week I go to my statistics tracker, count up my top referrers for the previous week, and post the list on my front page. This has helped my pages to grow and I do believe it has inspired other people to link my page in order to get that reciprocal front page link. This is an idea that I'd strongly recommend because I genuinely believe this can help you grow.
I hope some of these ideas will help you to increase the amount of traffic your web page is pulling. Best of luck and if this does bring in some traffic for you, don't forget to give me a link back. ;)
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