Promoting Your Website

Promoting your website is extremely important if you want to get ahead in the dog-eat-dog world of web publishing. Millions of eyes are looking around the Web and millions of mice are clicking away as we speak. Spooky, almost, if you think about it a little too much. Anyway, some of the people using the Web right now would probably be intensely interested in your products, services or information. So how are you going to guide them to your website?

"I've wanted to promote my website for a long time, but I just don't know how," you might say. Or maybe the costs are deterring you. But the fact is that you can do certain things to promote your site without spending two-thirds of an arm and three-quarters of a leg. Here are a few simple website promotion tips:

• Print business cards and pass them around, the old-fashioned way. Place them on bulletin boards in public places, like college campuses. Word of mouth is extremely influential in the lightning-fast age of the Internet. If a few people go to your site and like it, their friends will be visiting soon.

• Become an advertising affiliate with Google, Yahoo and other sites. You pay them a little and get your ads placed on search results pages. They pay you a little if you put ads up on your site for them and people click through to their sites. You'd be surprised how many visits you can get using this method.

• Make up a pretty banner ad and pitch it around to different Web directories and sites that are related to yours. Again, you'd be surprised how many people will click on a banner versus a text phrase.