Promoting Your Website

These days Internet Marketing is an industry in it's own right.

Fortunes are being made every day, selling the next big money-making idea to a hungry horde. And for every genuine strategy, tactic or tool, there's a dozen or more cheap rip-offs that just don't work.

So all I'm going to do here is give you a few fundamentals to start with and whet your appetite, then it's up to you to explore, experiment and develop a marketing strategy that suits your business and your market.

The Fundamentals

On the web it all comes down to traffic. Without visitor traffic your website is little more than high-tech vanity publishing.

Attracting a regular flow of targetted traffic to your website isn't easy either.

As you get into it you'll no doubt hear plenty of big promises from people trying to sell you "the last system you'll ever need to drive unbelieveable traffic to your website", but don't fall for it.

I'm not saying they won't work, just that you shouldn't be looking for one easy system.

Successful websites build up a viable volume of targetted visitor traffic from dozens of different sources. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work, and the only quick-fix solutions I've found are almost guaranteed to come back and bite you on the rear.

You will encounter a lot of hype in this area, but if you can turn on your BS-meter and concentrate on the content behind each system, you will find a genuine, practical methods for attracting visitors to your website.

So long term you want to look at many different traffic sources & strategies, and build up a broad 'portfolio' of traffic, so if one source slows down a bit it doesn't stop you in your tracks.

Likewise if you notice one source doing particularly well, you can divert some additional resources to take full advantage of it.

Here's a few ideas to get you started ...

Organic Search Engine Listings: No need to submit to most of them anymore. Add yourself to Open Direcory and Google will find you on it's own and the others follow soon after that.

Once Google has found you, (best to let them find you on their own) you can register with them and submit a Sitemap to make sure they index all your pages regularly.

Set up an email account and then login to your account ... you'll see a link to their Webmaster Tools section. Lots of info there on getting your site indexed.

Once Google has found you, you can use Site Submission software to get things moving. The key is to be patient and don't over do it. It is worth re-running the software every month or so, using different keyword phrases and different webpages, but don't keep submitting the same page over and over.

You can get a good free Site Submitter Here.

Then as long as you design your individual webpages around specific keyword phrases, add fresh new written content regularly, and build up quality backlinks, you'll eventually get listed for the most relevant items for you.

The trick here is to know your markets and be realistic. You aren't ever going to get top listing for 'photography' or 'photographer', but plan carefully and you might get a good listing for some of your subjects, or your specific field of work or "freelance photographer you-home-town".

Page Rank & Bank Links: Page rank is a value that Google assigns to every website in it's index. It is one big tangled web, and 'webmasters' only have themselves to blame.

A few years back people worked out that Google gave extra weight to sites with lots of incoming links, so everyone started swapping links with anyone and everyone, regardless of content or relevance ... simply building links for the sake of it.

The search engines soon worked out they were being duped ... as they usually do! ... so they developed a new way of evaluating content & website worthiness, and ranking them accordingly.

The theory goes something like this ... if a website links to you site using keywords in the link text, then the search engines will assume your site is relevant to those keywords, IF the referring site is at all relevant to those keywords.

The more relevant sites that link to your site with those keywords, the more important your site becomes. Likewise if other important sites link to your site, then your site must be pretty important too!

Get the idea ... links for the sake of links aren't going to do you much good, but quality links from relevant, good ranking sites will help improve your page rank.

Finding Quality Links: This is easy if you've got a bit of time ... go to Google and type in "add link photography" and you'll find some sites where you can add photography links. Add your details then try some variations:

Add Link Photography
Submit Link Photography
Submit URL photography
Submit Your Website Photography
Suggest a Website Photography

Add Link Photos
Submit Link Photos
Submit URL photos
Submit Your Website Photos
Suggest a Website Photos

Add Link Photographer
Submit Link Photographer
Submit URL photographer
Submit Your Website Photographer
Suggest a Website Photographer

Get the idea? This isn't something you want to rush, just something to keep a record of, so you can go back to it whenever you get the urge!

A lot of websites will ask for a recipricol link before they'll add your details. It can be a pain and probably isn't worth the messing around in a lot of cases.

What I'd suggest is you set up a 'links' page on your website with a means to add new links quickly and easily -- if you're using Wordpress this is built in -- so if you decide a site is worth linking back to, you can do it without too much bother.

Social Media Sites: Again whole books have been written on this, so rather than cover it here, I've included a few free ebooks on these below. They are important for page rank and a great source of direct traffic, so make sure you read the books and apply the strategies!

Email Marketing: Most successful online business operators will tell you a Mailing List is an essential part of their operation, and it's no different for photographers. As soon as possible, you need to start capturing an first name and email address from all your visitors, and develop a system for keeping in touch regularly.

Here's a great video presentation on Using Opt-In Forms To Build Your Mailing List by one of the leaders in the field, Armand Morin. This guy is a legend in the marketing circles, getting opt-in rates of 70% when everyone else was happy with 5-10%!

It is geared to the IM (Internet Marketing) crowd, but keep your mind open and you'll hear plenty of ideas you can apply with good effect to ANY business!

Article Marketing: This is another great strategy for building backlinks to your site and directly attracting targetted traffic.

If you already write then this is one of the most effective web promotion methods available to you, and even if you don't particularly like writing, there are ways aorund it ... check out this short book on Article Marketing .

Traffic Exchanges: There are a lot of these around and some do actually generate a lot of visitors, but again, if they aren't 'targetted' then it's not a lot of value.

One I do recommend is the Photo Web Traffic Exchange, because it's targetted to photography and other creative websites, so you're getting targetted traffic AND the search engines will recognise the sites as being relevant.

Banner Exchanges: These basically work by showing your banner once on other member sites for every couple of times you show other members banners on your site. These can be

Traffic Bars / Surfing Exchanges: These involve a small Ad Bar in your browser that reloads everytime you visit a new webpage, or refresh the one you're on. For every few Ads you see, you Ad get showns to someone else.

These are not an efficient form of advertising on their own ... they have the lowest click-through rate of any advertising I do online ... but they are free and the sheer volume of pages I view day-to-day means I rack up a lot of credits in a week.

The ads aren't at all intrusive. Most people hardly notice them, which is why they don't get clicked on much, but if you can run them for a while, get a feel for the stuff being offered -- Internet Marketing Get Rich Quick Schemes mostly -- and offer something totally different, you can get a steady stream of 'free' visitors who are also tired of ther hype.

The one I use is Free Traffic Bar. It's a Traffic Bar and Banner Exchange in one. I mostly use it to drive drive traffic to My PhotoWeb Traffic Exchange page, which then leverages those visitors in to better better quality 'photography' traffic.

It's not a huge volume of traffic but it was a few minutes to set up each site, and a grand total of 2-3 minutes a month to assign some ad credits to a new campaign.

How To Build A Red-Hot List Of
Buyers That Will Purchase Your Products!