Helping You Make Money!

Since a few people liked what I had to say on how to optimize your website for the Search Engine, I thought I would give a brief overview now of how to actually promote your website, now that you’ve taken the time to set it up correctly. It has become a lot more competitive in recent years, simply because of a number of factors:

(a) More people wanting to get rich ‘quick’ on the Internet, & live the ‘internet’ dream (“working” when you want to, etc) (b) Improvements in technology & submission processes (c) Media playing up the major ‘overnight’ successes (d) Big businesses that are already successful in other markets, that have no problem ‘dropping’ a million dollars on a project to ‘see’ if it works, that competes with the ‘little’ guy worried about whether he/she should spend $5 on this e-book, or $10 on that e-book.

One thing I’d say before I get into some of the actual steps you can take to promote your site is this: don’t promote junk, and don’t resort to junky methods of promotion.

Why shouldn’t you promote junk? Reasoning is this: If you promote junk — sure — you might make some sales, might even make a lot. But once people realize what you are promoting is junk, not only are they likely to try and get their money back (& you have to deal with subsequent customer service issues/e-mails/etc), but if you try promoting again, no one will probably will want to buy from you. (I.e., the story about ‘crying wolf’, how a guy was lonely while looking after sheep, so ‘cried wolf’ to get attention from the townspeople. The first few times they ran to help, then walked away annoyed after they realized they were duped. Then, when a wolf did actually come, none of the townspeople came simply because they didn’t believe him. Likewise, make sure you stick with quality products. On my site/affiliateinabox, I do precisely that.).

Furthermore, what kind of legacy do you want to leave? Do you want to say “Hey son, here’s my army of autoblog sites where all I simply do is take other people’ s content, rehash it, and hope that someone clicks on an advertisement so I can get money off of their efforts?” Or… wouldn’t it be more fulfilling and satisfying to say “Hey son, here’ s a list of products I created, and here are the testimonials from the people it has helped. Here is the customer list of happy and satisfied buyers. All you have to do is build on that now…”?

Why not resort to junky promotion methods?

Quite simply, because they won’t last. Yes, it’s true, that they might work temporarily, but then it becomes a ridiculous ‘arms’ race, where you are trying to keep up with the jones’s. Furthermore, it is becoming easier and easier through computer technology to filter out ‘junk’ results, and when that happens, the hundreds of hours used to promote that way go down the drain). People complain about the “google slap”, or the something or other “slap” — but usually this is quite simply because Google (or equivalent traffic source) has decided that the means of promotion were junk, and filters out those results. Although it’s possible now, probably when google more fully implements the context sensitivity algorithm into their search results, the thousands of ‘spun’ articles, copy-cat auto-blogging sites, and so forth, will drop like a stone from the search results.

As another example, a little while ago some people were upset because they had found an exploit using squiddoo pages to rank highly to promote products. Squiddoo decided that the means of promotion were junky, so deleted the tends of thousands of man hours setting up these ‘lenses’ with the click of a button.

I have a site from 10 years ago that still gets traffic, and still gets sales, simply because the strategies to promote it were solid. I’ve also had another site which has gone through several ‘google dances’ (when google changes their ranking algorithm), and the net effect is that my site seems to receive exactly the same amount of traffic it did before the dance.

So… what are some promotion methods you can implement today?

Promotional Methods:

• Article Submission. Write articles, and then use automated software to submit them to article directories. Make sure you resort to quality articles, and not thousands of respun/rehashed articles, because once the traffic sources get wise to your tactics, all they have to do is press the ‘delete’ button and you are gone. You have to spend hundreds of hours to try and achieve the same results you did before.
• Blog commenting. Post useful/insightful comments on blogs, and the owners will love you for it. It will give them a sense of pride, realizing they have contributed value to someone elses life, and that someone else has recognized those efforts. If your post is relevant, of course they don’t mind if you have your website URL listed. What they object to is the ‘spammy’ comments (i.e., ‘buy my product now, visit my site now’) which really contribute absolutely no value to the original post. Of course, blog commenting can be automated as well, but you need to make sure you find relevant blogs & post relevant comments on those blogs to see maximum results. Again, no one has a problem if you comment on their blog and happen to have your URL listed, so long as you are adding some kind of value.
• Forum discussions/signatures/etc. Again, a great way to build credibility & also get residual traffic. In fact, participate in a number of forums, and see your traffic multiply. But again the key is, providing on-topic, valuable information. If all you do is post a “yeah me too!” type comment, not only do people probably not really care what you have to say, but when you actually do have something to say, they will probably pay very little attention to it simply because previous comments had absolutely no value. Furthermore, forum owners can very quickly get annoyed by the barrage of ‘me-too’ comments, and again, it only takes them 1 second to press the ‘delete’ button, whereas it might have taken you 30 minutes to type in 30 ‘me-too’ comments.

Above are a few of the immediate steps you can take to start seeing an increase in your traffic, and subsequent business.

And be patient. I know this is the age of instant gratification. Microwaveable ‘instant’ meals, ‘instant’ cash if you don’t have it (credit cards), ‘instant’ entertainment (television), etc, etc. But building a business takes time, dedication, & patience. There is a reason the expression “Do what you love and the money will come” is so true. It’s not necessarily simply because people will pay you to do what you love. It’s usually because (a) you stick with it for a long time (patience), and (b) you actually like what you are doing, so are constantly trying to improve, which results in ‘quality’, which are two important steps to success.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed the post!