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Planning Your Web Site
Promotion Campaign
by Tony L. Callahan
So, you have your web Site completed. You have a
great product or service, outstanding page content
and a dazzling presentation. You have everything
you need to become the next Net millionaire,
except traffic. How do you go about getting
traffic to your site? If you subscribe to the
"Build it and they will come" school of web
promotion, read no further. I admire those of you
who have steadfast faith "miracle" web promotion.
If however you are not convinced that the masses
will beat a path to your door by themselves, then
read on.
There are several avenues of web site promotion
available to the web entrepreneur to utilize in
their web promotion campaigns. There are banner
exchange programs, Free For All (FFA) Links Pages,
On-line Classified Ads, mass e-mailings and the
elusive
search engines. Each of these major categories of
promotional tools comes in both free and paid
flavors (except FFA Links). In this article, we
will explore some of the features of these web
promotional tools.
Banner Exchange Programs
Banner exchange programs are
set up on the "You scratch my back and I'll
scratch yours" premise. The problem with this
premise is you have to scratch someone else's back
up to twice as much as they will scratch yours.
Many banner exchanges are based on a 2 to 1 ratio,
meaning that for every two of someone else's
banner that you display on your page, someone else
will display one of your banners. This is not a
bad deal for a high traffic site, but if your site
receives a lower volume of traffic, you don't get
much exposure. There is also the issue of
providing someone a door out of your business into
someone elses, possibly your competitors.
The alternative to the free exchange system is
offered by many of the banner exchange programs.
They are usually based on a rate per impressions
basis. This means that you pay a flat rate per
number of impressions. This will guarantee your
banner will be
displayed and is a good way to jump start the
traffic flow to your site. This also circumvents
the problem of a doorway out of your business as a
paid member of a banner exchange program is rarely
obligated to display other members banners.
Banner exchanges can be a wonderful way to get the
word out about your new web site. All of my web
businesses take advantage of one banner exchange
program or another. Just do not expect to sign up
with a banner exchange program, sit back and watch
the traffic pour in. A banner exchange program is
only one facet of a complete web promotion
campaign.
Free For All Links Pages
The major advantage of Free
For All (FFA) Links Pages are a low cost way to
get the word out about your site. Low cost in
terms of dollars, but certainly not in terms of
time. First you have to find the pages. Try
searching Web Crawler or Yahoo for free for
all links pages. You either get nothing or you
receive tens of thousands of results (depending on
your search terms). Now you must post your link to
these pages. Each submission takes between 3 and 5
minutes. You can see how this can quickly add up
to be a large amount of time.
The major advantage to FFA Links Pages is that
they can get your message in front of many people
very quickly and economically. To determine if the
FFA Link Page you have found is a good candidate
for your message, look at the way the page is set
up. Are there categories of links that allow
visitors to peruse only the type of ads they wish
to view? Are the links refreshed on a relatively
short interval? If there are more than 50 links
per category, I would not spend the time posting
to this site. Your ad will very
quickly become buried and invisible in the mass of
links. After posting to several FFA Links Pages,
watch your web site statistics. The sites that
generate traffic to you are the ones that you
should repost to.
If you have some time to spend on it, I recommend
that you try Free For All Links Pages as a part of
your web promotion campaign. All you have to lose
is the time that you invest in them and you have
total control over how much time that is.
On-line Classified Ads
My opinion of on-line
classified ads can be summed up in two words:
Don't Bother. The only people who spend time on
on-line classified ads are the sellers, not the
buyers. Therefore you only hope here is that by
some miracle your ad, out of the thousands of
others, catches some sellers eye. In addition to
this, you have the same issues of time and volume
that are present in the FFA Links Pages, as
described above.
There are also classified ads that for a fee offer
premium placement, flashy graphics, colored print
and a host of other features to make you ad stand
out. My opinion of these offerings is not much
better than my opinion about the free on-line
classifieds. If you have a very unique product or
service, something that everyone just has to have,
by all means give this avenue a try. But if you
are like most of us, whose products are not that
unique or vital to everyone's survival, you would
be better off spending your web promotion
campaigns time, money and Wholesale traffic reseller accounts in other
places.
Mass E-mailings
When I speak of mass
e-mailings, I know some of you out there are
thinking SPAM. I have only one comment on spam:
DON'T DO IT! Sorry about shouting, but this is one
area I feel very strongly about. Not only is spam
receiving a large about of attention for
various governing bodies, but it is a waste of the
spammers time. Think about it. Do you read spam
e-mail? And if you do read it, how often do you
act on it? Lastly, what do you think of the type
of company that would use this type of tactics?
This is not the
type of message that most of us want to put
forward to our potential customers.
So is there an acceptable way to use e-mail in
your web promotion campaigns? The answer is, yes
there is. In order to properly use e-mail in your
web promotion campaigns it is necessary to obtain
the recipient's permission before sending the
e-mail. There are several ways to do this, but the
most common is the opt-in mailing list. Simply
put, you ask your web sites visitors to join your
mailing list. Equally important, you must also
give each recipient the opportunity to cancel
their membership in your
mailing list at any time.
Once your mailing list is compiled, don't inundate
your readers with e-mail. There is a difference
between being informative and being a pest. If
your readers begin to feel overwhelmed by your
mailings, they will begin to ignore them. Worse
yet, they may
stop doing business with you all together. My
research indicates that every two to four weeks is
sufficient to remind your readers who you are
without overwhelming them with junk e-mail.
Search Engines
There is currently a
substantial debate raging as to whether or not it
is necessary for a web site to be listed in the
search engines in order to be successful. Putting
all the rhetoric aside for a moment, the simple
answer is: You must be listed in the search
engines in order to be successful. Internet usage
is growing at an incredible rate. More and more
users go on-line every day. And how are those
users finding what they are looking for? Search
engines! One only has to look at the success of
the scores of search engines to see that this is
true.
The real issue at hand is how important is
placement in the search engines? My answer is that
placement is the most important issue related to
the search engines. Many surveys and studies
reveal that if your site is not in the first three
pages of search results, it may as well not be
there at all! How's that for important?
Here is where the debate gets fiery. How much of
your web promotion campaigns Wholesale traffic reseller accounts is it worth
to get a good placement in the search engines? And
how do you go about getting this type of
placement? There are many theories floating about
out there, theories about META tags and keywords,
content and descriptions. In the next issue
of Web-Links Monthly, I will explore these
theories and attempt to make some sense of them.
Until then, it will have to suffice to say:
Register your sites with the search engines! This
may be the most important single component of your
web promotion campaign.
In order to conduct a successful web site
promotion campaign, it is necessary to utilize as
many avenues of promotion as is practical. Banner
exchange programs, Free For All (FFA) Links Pages,
On-line Classified Ads, mass e-mailings and search
engines
all have their advantages and disadvantages. It
will be left as an exercise for the reader to
determine which of these avenues is right for your
particular business.
Copyright 1998, 2002 Tony L. Callahan, All Rights
Reserved
Tony L. Callahan is
president of his own Internet marketing company,
Link-Promote http://www.link-promote.com. He also
publishes Web-Links Monthly, a newsletter full of
tips, tricks, tools and techniques for successful
web site promotions. To subscribe, email
Web-Links-subscribe@topica.com.
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