Web Site Promotion

How to Promote Your Site and Still Have a Life

K. Laskowski October, 2001 © e-work-zone.com

A few years back, you could build your web site, spend a few hours getting it submitted to all the major search engines, wait a week or maybe two, and then 'voila', people started showing up at your site. If you didn't have top 50 ranking, maybe not as many visitors as you would have liked, so maybe you joined a web-ring, or started talking up the site on your favorite message board, and little by little you started generating a fair amount of traffic (assuming you had a decent site).

Today, you can forget about submitting your site to any of the major search engines unless you are willing to pay $200 plus for the privilege. The ones that will take your submission for free may get around to indexing your site in a couple/three months, and then your number 8012 out of God knows how many sites on your topic. Or you can pay for a 'sponsored' listing with Google or others, which isn't a bad way to go if you have money to spend on advertising. But what do you do if your advertising budget is zilch (which is the case for most net-preneurs when they are just starting out). If you are like me, you will try to exhaust every free mechanism known to the net which ends up consuming so much time that you almost forget about that great web-site you started out trying to attract visitors to.

There has to be a better way -- and thanks to some of the latest ideas of some also frustrated internet marketers, there are now three great free ways to get new visitors to your site:

• Startpage/Surf-for-Hits Programs
• Exit Pop-under Programs
• Free Banner Exchanges

That's not to say you shouldn't try submitting your site to search engines anymore, just don't obsess about it -- it's just not worth spending all that effort to move up from page 70 to page 65 in the results -- either way, no-one is going to see your site that way. But these three types of traffic generating programs really do work, so check them out and sign up for any you aren't already using now.

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