Promoting my site is something that I’ve done in the past without really paying much attention. I’d do little things here and there but I’ve never sat down and made a conscious marketing plan or anything. I think it’s something I’ll focus on more once I have my sites all up and running and am doing this full time. But for now, here are a few things that I’ve done to promote my site or try to get it higher in the search engine rankings.
- Link to new site from my other sites – The first thing I do once I finish a new site is link to it like crazy from my existing sites. My budget travel site has had a lot of Google love in the past and links to my new sites from it have always gotten me listed pretty quickly. Once you have a network of similar sites linking between them is, I think, a great way to keep them all ranking well.
- Link exchanges – I don’t really do link exchanges much anymore. If I’m approached by someone wanting a link on Travoholic.com then I’ll sometimes agree but ask them to link to another site of mine instead of linking back. This creates a three way link and is supposed to be better for search engine rankings.
- Buy links on related sites – If I’m targeting some competitive keywords then I might consider buying links on another site. At the moment my focus is more on selling them, but if I see a bargain over on the Digital Point link sales forum I will scoop it up. Whether it helps with my site’s rankings though is anyone’s guess.
- Submit to search engines – The search engines will find you once you have some good inbound links but it doesn’t hurt to stalk them a bit.
- Post to relevant forums with the URL in the signature – I wouldn’t recommend that you go out and post to loads of forums just to promote your site because I think the time spent doing this won’t be worth the traffic you receive. But if you’re going to be posting to forums that interest you anyways, make sure you put your new site’s URL in the signature.
- Comment on blogs – Same as above. Bloggers are more likely to be interested in reading other blogs so instead of putting a link to one of my websites, I put one to this blog.
- Submit articles to other sites – I’ve heard lots of people singing the praises of article submission sites but I’ve never had any results. I think a better method is to create an original article and then contact a fellow blogger or website owner in the same niche about submitting your article or guest posting on their blog. I would happily accept unique articles for any of my sites and give out a bit of link love as payment and so will a lot of website owners. I guess it comes down to deciding whether it’s worth the time to write an article in exchange for a inbound links – I think it is. I write occasionally over on Brave New Traveler which brings in a bit of traffic, good one-way inbound links and $20 to boot!
- Google Adwords – I built a site awhile ago that pretty much exists solely to sell stuff. I wasn’t getting much traffic at all to the site so decided to use Adwords as an experiment. Didn’t seem to help much but didn’t cost me much either. There are people who use Adwords with a lot of success but I am not one of them.
- Contests – I’ve never run a contest before but I have an evil master plan in the pipeline that I’m hoping will bring attention to a new site I’m working on. The idea is to hit up people who run travel blogs, tell them about my new site and offer them an entry in a draw for some prize if they post a blog entry about it. No idea what the prize will be or if this will fly but I see a lot of money making blogs doing this sort of thing so it’s worth a try. I’ll post about it all in detail once I get things underway in a few weeks. The only way to see if it works is to try it out!
If your site’s content is good and unique then will make an impact on Google eventually. If it’s excellent then people might start linking back to it without having to be asked. Getting your site’s search engine rankings to rise is a complicated game and nobody really knows for sure what works but it’s sort of fun trying out lots of new things. I will definitely be taking a more pro-active approach in the near future and will keep you posted on whether my ideas turn out to be super successful or total flops.
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