Website Promotion Crash Course

Repeat Traffic

Chances are, you've gone to a lot of trouble to encourage visitors to your Website, so don't let it be a one-time-only deal. Here are some ideas that anyone can use to maximize their site's hit rate.

Provide Regular, Fresh Content

People that have an interest in what you do will return if they believe they'll find more information on successive visits. If they come back a couple of times and find nothing new, they probably won't ever come back.

To a certain degree you can even control how often your visitors return by how often you publish new content. For example, I visit SitePoint.com every day as there is almost always a fresh article every day, but I visit Webmonkey.com once every few weeks, as they don't publish so often.

Create 'Website-Only' Offers

This is also fresh content of course, and if you do this regularly, you'll increase repeat visits (providing that your special offers are of genuine benefit). Try to time these offers to be just a little more frequent than your average repeat sale: that way you can close the gap between sale number one and two a little. Be careful not to overdo it, though.

Create a Mailing List

In order to tell people when you published fresh content, especially new offers, send out a newsletter to your subscribers. Mailing lists are very easy to set up and can generate huge rewards to your business if done properly. Yahoo! provide a free and easy service at Yahoo groups that you might like to check out.

Provide a Forum

Facilitate the discussion of your products or services between users of your site. Make sure that knowledgeable members of your staff keep an eye on the messages posted there and answer them when appropriate.

This can be quite a tricky thing to set up but there are several free solutions and one of the best is ezboard, which can be set up by pretty much anyone. If you've hired a professional Web designer to build your site, they shouldn't have too much trouble setting up something that's a little more comprehensive for you.

Put Technical Documentation Online

If you sell or provide anything that requires instructions or manuals, make copies of them available online. People lose manuals easily, and it's a simple thing to tell them that they can find the current instructions/documentation on your site -- which will of course expose them to all of your other material at the same time.

Viral Marketing Techniques

Visitors can be very hard to come by, so give your users every opportunity to tell others about your site. Viral marketing, despite its name, is not something dirty or underhand. The most famous examples of viral marketing are Hotmail and The Blair Witch Project.

This is an immense topic and a detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this article, but here are few viral techniques you can use immediately to increase your hit rate.

Provide Free eMail Addresses

Give your friends and family email addresses that promote your company. If you have a cool domain name, they'll be much happier with ivana@yourcompany.com than ivana@123ivana_s@somebigprovider.com -- and that simple act will distribute your domain name every time they email.

If you have unlimited email addresses then why not offer them to everyone who visits your site? There are several companies that will help you do this, including Everyone.net