Introduction
Okay, so you’ve dipped a toe in the water and you’ve found a way to make your first website. Perhaps you’ve created a blog to talk about things you know, or you’ve got the beginnings of an authority site that will help others find the information they need?
The plain truth is, that’s all very well but unless you get traffic to your site, you are unlikely to ever get enough people to see your information to make a difference. That is why you did it right? You wanted to make a difference to the world, you want your info to help others and you’d like people around the world to be grateful that you bothered to try?
Or are you aiming to make some money online? If the latter is the case, there is even more reason for you to try gathering a list of people to market to otherwise no-one will buy. If you need a list, you need to promote your site well.
The nuts and bolts
This is where the problem starts. How many opportunities are there to put your site out there? How many seconds are there in a year?
You will find if you start looking that there are possibly more methods of promoting and marketing ideas on the internet than there are things being sold, in actual fact, it’s entirely possible that the thing being sold more often than not is a way of selling things.
Okay – let’s look at some of those methods in a bit more detail.
Surfing If you start looking for these sites and heaven forbid you actually sign up for one, you’ll probably find, as I have, that dozens more appear as if by magic and you can pretty much spend your life clicking away aimlessly trying to build up your credits so people can click away aimlessly and ignore your site as well. Wait a minute, I’m ahead of myself here. What is surfing to start with?
Well it works like this. Some sites you’ll need to pay to use (I never do) and some are free to join. What you do is sign up so that you can put your site on a list of sites that are shown on a rotating basis to thousands of other people who have done the same thing and want you to view their site too.
The sites are generally easy to get around (if a little confusing at first) and it shouldn’t take you long to get your website listed on a few of these ‘surf to earn’ sites and then you just need to get some credits so that your site will be listed for others to see in the rotation. How do you get credits? The general method is to surf yourself. You’ll be shown other people’s sites for an average of 10 seconds before you can click to move on to the next one. The more you do this, the more credits you’ll earn and the more airtime your own site should then receive.
Your second option is to start paying for things, to pay for your site to be seen, to buy credits. We’ll look at paying for things again in a minute.
Is it worth it?
Well, bearing in mind that the search engines are looking for sites that are active, that people want to view and are indeed viewing on a regular basis, it would indeed help if your site is seemingly ‘more visible’ than other people who are talking about similar things.
To give you an idea, one of my recent sites had an extra 50 hits in the course of 2 days on this basis alone, from 2 surfing sites where i literally spent an hour each night watching the tv and clicking aimlessly and occasionally having another site grab my attention.
It follows that if you took the time to do this on a regular basis, you’d start a flow of regular traffic to your site.
Route 2 – Google AdWords and AdSense
This route is much talked about and has plenty of support from across the globe so it cannot be discounted as a realistic route to getting people to see that you exist.
In simple terms you are either adding adverts to your own site that in some way will reflect what your site is discussing or selling (AdSense) or you are paying Google to appear prominently on it’s search engine when people input a search term (AdWords).
AdSense These adverts will be placed in a reasonably prominent position on the page and you will be paid a small amount of money each time someone clicks on an advert to visit someone else’s site. This is CPC or cost per click advertising and you could also employ this the other way round by paying Google a fee to have people click on your site if they’ve been referred to your page from another site using the AdSense tool.
AdWords AdWords adverts are usually placed on the 1st page of Google either at the top or the right hand side of a page. The position you achieve in the listing is a reflection of how much you were prepared to pay to put it there, the more you pay, the higher up and thee more prominent it becomes.
Obviously, in a competitive market the cost of doing either of these things can start to rise and in my view this elicits a word to the wise.
Whilst I would agree that my own efforts have yielded results in this way, i would suggest that the expense may get slightly prohibitive unless you are factoring in a prescribed budget as part of a marketing plan and you have a cash flow that will support it, just remember to always keep tabs on it otherwise the costs may mount up.
Social Networks
The most interesting route I’ve found so far has had the most surprising result but in truth now I look back on it, it shouldn’t really have been that much of an eye opener.
What are these social networks all about? They are linking the planet through the simple expedient of people talking about the things that interest them most, in many cases, they simply talk about themselves and their own lives.
I’m talking here about things like Twitter, MySpace, Bebo and YouTube, places where people their lives and their loves with the rest of the world.
The simple truth is this, people love talking about themselves and lots of people enjoy reading what people are talking about. take the case of the biggest amounts of Twitter interest today. Britney Spears (nearly 4 million followers), President Obama (nearly 2.8 million followers about the same in popularity as Oprah Winfrey there at the moment), Ryan Seacrest (approx 2.7 million followers). That’s an awful lot of people around the world catching up on every move, every thought, every deed that’s articulated through Twitter on a minute by minute basis.
Now why is that of use to you? Well let’s say you want to talk about cake making and that your blog or website is dedicated to ckae making and that maybe the income you could derive from the site is the sale of cake making tools and ingredients and that you already have a supplier lined up to provide these things at cost price so you can make a profit from selling them online?
If you liberally dose the internets social media sites with articles, comments and information on cake making and you start to look for and attract followers who are interested in what yo have to say, do you think you might be able to direct some of them to your site and that some might then buy something?
This again is a little time consuming but to give you a benchmark, in 3 weeks, one of my sites went from around 20 views per month to over 300 views in 3 weeks and that was by talking about my life, not the subject in question. If you become recognised as an authority on your subject, it’s entirely possible that you’ll have thousands virtually knocking on the virtual door to your online shop and I suspect sales may follow.
Set up shop
Another thing to bear in mind has to be sites such as eBay. What started off as an idea to sell old tat on line and make a few bob has spiralled into the global phenomenon that is the worlds biggest online market. Some people make their entire living from selling goods their and still others from selling information products about how to do it, such is the interest. If you add your goods, services and knowledge to the pot here as well (deceptively simple to do) then it’s yet another tool you can use to promote that website you’ve built.
Tell people about it
Last but by no means least – you could do exactly what I’ve done here and share your own experiences with people in the form of articles that you place on sites like EzineArticles, GoArticles or Article Dashboard. These are also places where magazine editors, the media and the search engines themselves look for new content on an hourly basis so that can feed the ever growing demand for information.
Think you’ll find it hard to write about things? I beg to differ. You probably have no problem telling all and sundry locally about your marvelous cakes so why not write down just what springs to mind and tell the rest of the world?
Conclusion
This is the briefest of overviews of what is indeed a very large subject but if you’re new to this, perhaps it’s given you a few thoughts and you can go off and start looking for your own specific answers.
I’m just gonna keep learning and passing on what I’ve found – if I’d looked harder to start with, perhaps I could have saved time, effort and money but the journey might not have been so interesting.
Hope you enjoyed the read and do let me know if i can be of any assistance.