Does it require a lot of constant work - i.e, sending tons of stuff to search engines, lots of spam email and all that?
It depends on what you mean by "lots of work". Would you consider the effort
as "lots of work" if you could automate it? For example, instead of submitting
to search engines one-by-one, I could purchase a software that submits
automatically and intelligently for me every day on a scheduled time, where I
won't need to be around to supervise nor monitor. Is this also considered as
"lots of work"?
My own testimony is that I don't think I've been putting in a lot of time
and effort now as compared to when I was trying to learn the ropes by trial and
error. But through the process, I found out that not every promotion tip that
was published on the Internet actually works. Nevertheless, having gone through
the stages, I am now really earning a small passive income (US$200-$400 a month)
on a monthly basis. For me, my plan now is to strategise to bring my website
business into the next level where my monthly income should reach the range of
thousands. With the experience that I've gained, one approach is to teach and
help others to take this path which I've taken - not a really ambitious one, but
one with a steady approach to building a passive income stream.
Let me share with you what I've experienced in website promotion that
worked and did not work for me. Some others may disagree with my opinion, but
that's ok as this is my own experience and others may have a different
experience.
Email Spamming via "Opt-in" Mailing Lists - hardly
works.
- Have tried this at the early stages of my website
promotion. Spent quite a bit of money on this too. Didn't work out for me. When
I check the website traffic logs, most of the traffic came from search engines:
about 40% from Yahoo, 20% from Google and 20% from MSN. The rest are not worth
mentioning.
Email to friends and known contacts - depends
-
When I announced the launch of my website to my friends and known contacts, the
results were not as expected. I found out much later because I asked them if
they have visited my website. Sheepishly, they apologised and gave different
excuses. End of the day - only one or two actually visited my website.
Submission to FFA (Free For All) websites - hardly
works.
- I guess by now no one really cares about FFA sites,
especially search engines. Most of the FFA sites are ignored by search engines
so if your website is linked from these sites, they probably won't contribute to
your link popularity in the search engines.
Submission to major search engines - this works if your page is
well optimized.
- This is one step that I'm consistently doing.
If I were to submit manually, it's a lot of work. However, I automated the
process by using a reknowned software known as WebPositionGold Pro. The software
is quite expensive, in the range of two - three hundred dollars. However, it's
worth the investment and I have bought and used the software to optimize my
website as well as to automate the submission process.
- Another method that
I find especially useful for beginning websites is to pay for guaranteed search
inclusion for the first two years or so. For a couple of hundred dollars, you
pay the company to submit to search engines on your behalf on a monthly basis,
and they guarantee your page to be listed in the search engine. The flip side to
this is that there is no guarantee on which page would you be listed in the
search engines. Reason: If you can't get your website into the first three pages
of a search phrase result, your website is unlikely to be visited. Therefore,
web page optimization is a important step in website promotion.
Website Link Exchange - Works well if...
- Doing
link exchange with websites of relevant themes does help boost traffic to your
websites. This is the concept that Google Adsense work on, and there are people
who are earning about US$100 a month purely using the Google Adsense program.
This is a different program altogether so I will not dwell on this here.
Participation in relevant web forums - Effective when you
establish yourself as an expert in the community
- This is what
is exactly happening as a relationship between you and me. You saw my posts,
decided that it's worth it to find out more, write to me, and here we go...
-
This is extremely effective as you can have one-to-one communication on the
subject concern. In sales, they propagate one-on-one interaction because it's
most personal and the salesman can adapt to meet the customer's real
needs.
Participation in free classified ads of other websites - Depends
on your luck
- This really depends whether there is a need at
the point in time when you place your ads, and how relevant and attractive it is
to the reader.
Traditional methods of promotion
- Distributing
flyers all over the place - low effectiveness
- Placing the flyers at a
friend's shop or counter where human traffic is high - quite good
- Postal
mail drops - expensive and no guarantee of effectiveness
That's about it for now. To a certain extent, the beginning always require
a bit of effort. But it doesn't take the whole day. If your budget is around
US$250 a year, the second approach (
http://discovervalue.com/bizop2 )
could save you a lot of time because building a page is a matter of less than 15
minutes. The good thing is once it gets rolling, it takes less and less effort
to keep it rolling. Think about it.
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