Web Promotion 101
By: John Skorczewski
Copyright © 2001-2002 Market-Tek Enterprises, Inc. http://www.Market-Tek.com Table Of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One - Getting Started Chapter Two - Exchanging Links With Other Web Sites Like Yours Chapter Three - Posting Messages on Message Boards Chapter Four - Web Promotion Using eZines Chapter Five - The All Important Search Engine Submission Chapter Conclusion Appendix A - Checklist of Web Promotion Techniques Appendix B - Ezine Resources (places to find ezines on any subject) Appendix C - Web Site Resources Appendix D - Free Gift, Complete Resell/Distribution Rights To This Book!
Introduction Welcome to Web Promotion 101! Today I’ll be teaching you the absolute basics about promoting a web site on the Internet today. This book is aimed at the beginner, but even a more experienced marketer can learn from it. The information within is kept as up to date as possible. Since it’s being released in eBook form, it’s a lot easier to keep the content current. If you have any questions anytime while reading the book, or after you’re finished with it, please feel free to email me anytime. I’m glad to discuss anything web promotion related. My email address is supervisor@market-tek.com
Chapter One… Getting Started As in anything in life…to be successful you have to be focused. So let’s take a minute to focus on our goal. The goal of web site promotion is very simple and straightforward. That goal is to drive more targeted traffic to your web site. What do I mean by targeted? By targeted I mean, people that are interested in whatever your web site is selling. If you have a web site about dogs, bringing 100,000 CAT lovers to your site would be completely useless. A targeted visitor for a dog site would be a dog lover, dog owner, dog enthusiast etc. So before you begin any web promotion, take a moment to sit down and map out exactly who your target audience is. Get out a sheet of paper and make a list of the type of people you would like to come to your web site. This is one of the single most important steps to effective web site promotion. Web promotion is fairly easy once you determine who your target audience is. Ok, now you have a list of your target audience. The only thing left to do is find those people and get them to come to your web site! Nooooo problem.
Chapter Two… Exchanging Links With Other Web Sites Like Yours In this chapter I’ll be talking about exchanging links with other web sites. Exchanging links with other web site owners who have sites similar to your own site is one of the most basic web promotion tactics out there. It will take a lot of effort on your part, but it can really pay off and it goes a long way in setting a firm foundation for other web promotion tactics. Here’s what you do. Head over to your favorite search engine. I use Google.com. Let’s say you have a site about dog training. Type in the phrase ‘Dog Training’ at Google and see what comes up. Make a list of as many of the sites that come up as you can. The more sites you add to your list the better. Hold onto that list, we’ll be using it again later. Next go to each web site on your list. Find the email address of the site’s owner. Send them a short email introducing yourself. Tell them a little about your web site and then ask if they would like to exchange links with you. If they do, you’ll create a page at your web site with links to all the other sites that agree to link with you, and they will put a link to your site on their site. This isn’t just a good way to gain targeted site traffic, but by creating a link page of other web sites similar to your own, you are creating a good resource for your site visitors. If they can’t find what they’re looking for at your site, they can look at your ‘related links’ section and maybe find what they’re looking for. Believe me, if you create a high quality link page, your site visitors will come back again and again to use it. Not only will you create extra site traffic and a great resource for your visitors, but you’ll also form relationships with other site owners who have similar web sites. Success is based, in part, on the relationships you form. It never hurts to get out there and meet people with similar businesses. Remember to hold onto your list of web sites that are similar to yours. Your list should include the web site’s title, its web address, the email address of the owner, and the first and last name of the owner. Keeping this list will come in handy later on. I’ll discuss that later. That’s really all there is to link exchanges. This is something you can do forever. Every few weeks I like to head over to the search engines and look for new sites that are similar to mine.
Hey, setting up link relationships may be a little bit difficult, but it’s free! And if you set up a few link exchanges a week, in no time at all you’ll be surprised at the result.
Chapter Three… Posting Messages on Message Boards In this chapter I’m going to talk about message boards. Message boards are web sites that allow visitors to post messages to other visitors. They are sort of mini-communities on the internet and you can find them everywhere and on just about any subject imaginable. Message boards are hotbeds of discussion, sometimes heated, sometimes casual, where you can find a group of people with similar interests. Apart from being fun places to talk with similarly minded people, message boards can drum up some pretty good traffic for your web site if used correctly. Head back over to your favorite search engines and search for message boards under whatever subject your web site is about. Make up a list of as many as possible. As I said, message boards can bring you decent traffic, but only if you use them correctly. If you stumble into a message board and post a message like this: "Hey everyone…come look at my new site about dogs!" you’ll probably get ignored. That’s not the way to use message boards. You have to become involved in the discussions of the board. Get into the discussions, make a name for yourself. Spend a couple weeks just reading other people’s posts to get a feel for the board. Each board has its own set of etiquette rules. Learn them.
Most boards, on the other hand, will allow you to post a short signature at the end of each message you post allowing you a short blurb to tell people about your site. An average signature might be something like this: Best Wishes, John Skorczewski http://www.Market-Tek.com **Marketing Instruction To Guarantee Your Site’s Success** Now all you have to do is follow along in the conversations, or start your own. As long as you are posting messages that go along with the discussion, everything will be fine. For example…let’s say you see a message from Linda and it says this: Hi, I’m Linda. I have a 6 month old German Shepherd puppy. Can someone tell me what age I can start feeding him adult dog food? Thanks, Linda You could respond like this: Hi Linda, You generally shouldn’t start feeding a puppy adult food till he reaches the age of X until then you should feed him puppy food. I recommend X brand of dog food, they really have the best puppy food. If you have any other questions feel free to email me anytime at myaddress@whatever.com or head over to my web site www.DogOwner.com Best, Nancy Weirdname http://www.DogOwner.com **Everything you ever wanted to know about Dogs** See how that works? Now Linda may come to your site, as well as anyone else from the board that happens to read your message. See how you advertised without really advertising? As long as you give good advice that’s related to whatever question the person asked, you will be fine. This is also a good way to make a name for yourself as someone who knows what they’re talking about. Word of mouth from other people at the message board can be very valuable to your web site. I recommend that you find as many message boards as you can and spend a couple of hours each day surfing them, and posting messages when it’s relevant for you to do so. I keep a number of message boards book marked on my web browser and I visit them every day. Don’t over do it. Don’t post messages just to post messages. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t post anyway and try to wing it. People will see through you. Only post messages when you genuinely have something useful to add. And that’s really all there is to message boards. You can find message board CGI scripts for free all over the place on the Internet. That means you can start your own message board on your web site. You might want to think about doing just that! Once you get a steady following at your message board, you can expect steady traffic to your site as a result for a long time to come. www.Cgi-resources.com is one site where you can find a message board cgi script. If you don’t know much about installing CGI scripts, you may need to find someone to help you install it. For anyone that knows what they’re doing with CGI, a message board script can be installed and up and running in less than a half hour.
Chapter Four… Web Promotion Using eZines In this chapter I’ll be discussing all things ezine. First of all, what is an ezine? An ezine, or newsletter as they are also called, is simply a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly email message sent out by someone to a group of people who have requested it, ‘subscribed’. They’re kind of like mini electronic magazines. There are thousands of ezines on the Internet pertaining to just about any topic you can imagine. Most are free to subscribe to. You see ezines all over the place. Most web sites offer their own ezines as a way to keep in touch with visitors. You should start your own ezine about whatever your site is about. We’ll talk about this more later. There are several ways to gain traffic to your site through ezines. Namely:
Before we go any further, I need to discuss something important. There are two types of ezines.
The first, opt-in ezines are what we will be dealing with. The second, unsolicited bulk email should be avoided at all costs. If you send out bulk email to a group of people that haven’t asked to receive your email, you will get in trouble with your web hosting provider, and you will probably lose you web site and internet connection. We call this SPAM. Don’t do it period. A quick distinction should be made here. A few chapters ago when I told you to find other web site owners and email them asking to swap links, that is not considered spam because you aren’t sending BULK mail out to complete strangers. With the link exchange, you are directly emailing a single person personally with a specific question about their web site. This is completely ok for you to do. Ok, so back to ezines and how they can increase your site traffic. Once again, there are several ways to get traffic from ezines:
Number 1, writing articles for other people’s ezines. Whatever your web site is about, you probably know quite a bit about it. So write some page long articles about whatever topic your site pertains to. At the end of each article put a small signature (like your message board signature but a little bit more in depth). Head over to your favorite search engine and search for ezines that relate to your web site. Make a big list of these ezines and subscribe to them all. Spend a couple weeks reading the ezines to get a feel for them, then write articles that will fit in with the ezine. Email the owner of the ezine and send them your article and ask them to print it in their ezine. Many will, especially if your article will be beneficial to the other ezine subscribers in some way. Ezine editors are regular people like you and me. Every week they have to send out their ezine. Often they don’t have anything to write about and will GLADLY accept your article. Overnight your article, and therefore you signature ad, can be seen by thousands of targeted people at a cost of ZERO dollars to you. Just like posting to message boards, don’t write an article that’s nothing more than a big advertisement for your site. Put yourself in the shoes of the readers. What would interest them? What do they want to know about? Write about this. If your article is informative and helpful, those readers will check out your web site as mentioned in your signature file at the end of the article. You can look at other articles that have been run in the ezine before to see what other writers put in their signature. Emulate their signatures. A normal signature might look something like this: ************************************************* Article Written by Mary Weirdname Permission to reprint This article granted as long as this signature remains intact. Mary Weirdname is the owner of http://www.DogLover.com Where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know About dogs, dog training, dog nutrition, and dog grooming ************************************************* You get the picture. Find as many ezines as you can, submit your articles weekly. Keep at it, it may take you a while to find ezines that will accept your articles but when you do it will really pay off. The Second way to gain traffic with ezines is by purchasing ad space in them. Many ezines sell ad space very cheaply. One ezine I recently purchased ad space in went out to over 180,000 subscribers twice a week. I purchased a 3 line classified ad that went out in 2 issue of the ezine and it cost me $30. Yep, 30 bucks gets my small ad seen twice by over 180,000 subscribers. Not bad huh? Granted all ezines aren’t sent out to that many people. And all ezine ads aren’t that cheap. A 6-7 line top sponsor ad in the same ezine I just mentioned costs around $300 dollars…still a pretty good deal. Ezine subscriber bases can be anywhere from 500 readers to several hundred thousand. No matter what the readership number, you’ll be hard pressed to find a cheaper way to get the word out about your web site. I could write an entire book about writing good pulling advertisements for ezines, and that’s not really a newbie thing to talk about so I’ll leave it at that. The third way to gain traffic using ezines is to start your own ezine. Every time someone comes to your site, offer them the chance to sign up for free to your ezine. Get their email address and first name. Then every week or two send out a small email newsletter to all the people on your list. This is a GREAT way to stay in touch with people who you already know are interested in your site. This way you can contact them whenever you add new stuff to your web site that they may be interested in, or if you come out with a new product, you can use your ezine to sell it to those people. I could write an entire book about starting your own ezine as well, and it goes way beyond the scope of this book, so I’ll just tell you to look into starting your own ezine. Your list of subscribers will become your number one asset online. And also, once you get enough subscribers, you can start selling ad space as well!
Chapter Five… The All Important Search Engine Submission Chapter In this chapter I’ll be talking about search engine submission. Search engine submission is a great way to gain steady site traffic very cheaply. According to Media Metrix, 85-95 percent of all internet traffic comes from the top 10-12 search engines. If you can get your site listed on those major search engines, you can get a piece of that traffic. Plus search engine traffic is highly targeted! We’ll pretend you have a site about Dogs. When a person goes to the search engines and types in the word "dog" a link to your site will appear leading them straight to you. You can’t get any more targeted than that. How do you get listed on those major search engines? That’s the hard part. Getting your site listed at the major search engines is almost a science in itself. There’s an entire industry of experts who get paid for doing nothing more than getting people’s web sites listed at the search engines. People charge a lot of money to do this for you. Anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousands dollars. Most also charge maintenance fees of several hundred dollars per month to make sure that your site stays listed at the top of the search engines. (this is because each month, as other people submit their sites to be listed, YOUR site can get pushed further down the list. You need to resubmit your site every month to keep a high listing). Very few beginners can afford to pay this kind of cash, plus it’s hard to even find a good company to handle this work for you. You never know who the real search engine submission experts are. To get around this problem, a number of companies sell search engine submission software that allows anyone, even a beginner, to successfully submit their sites to the search engines and get a good ranking. I’ll talk about the best of these tools later on. I highly recommend you purchase the software to do this. The software costs just a fraction of what you would have to pay a professional and is worth every penny. First we need to talk about search engine optimization. You must optimize your site in order to get it listed on the search engines. This means you have to add a few things to your web site so that it has the best chance of getting listed at the search engines. Search engines optimization is no big deal if you know what to do…and I’m going to tell you everything you need to know. The first thing is Meta Tags. Meta Tags What are meta tags? Meta tags are small HTML tags that you place on your web page. When you submit your site to the search engines, the search engines send automated robots, called spiders, to your web site. The spiders automatically scan all the content of your site. They then take this information and use it to determine where to list you on their search engine. If you have a site about dogs for instance, the spiders will scan your site, see that it is about dogs, and report to the search engine that your site should be listed under the dogs category. One of the main things the spiders check is your meta tags. These tags tell the spiders what your site is all about. There are 2 tags you should have, the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag. As the names suggest, these two tags tell the search engines a description of your site and suggest some keywords to list your site under. These two tags look like this, and should be placed between your web pages <head> and </head> tag: <meta name="description" content="Dog World, Learn about dog breeds, buy dog toys, get advice on dog training, read about different dog foods"> <meta name="keywords" content="Dogs, Dog Training, Dog Health, Dog Toys, Pet, Dog breeding, Dog breeds, Dog Food, Personalized Dog Collars"> Notice that the keywords in the keywords meta tag are separated by commas. It’s pretty straight forward. The search engine submission tool I’ll be recommending later in the chapter has a built in Meta Tag creator that will make sure that you’ve built your meta tags correctly. Meta tags aren’t the only thing spiders look for on your site. They also check your site Title. By title, I mean whatever you have written in your title tag on your web page. <html> <title>Joe’s Dog World Web Site</title> <meta name="description" content="Dog World, Learn about dog breeds, buy dog toys, get advice on dog training, read about different dog foods"> <meta name="keywords" content="Dogs, Dog Training, Dog Health, Dog Toys, Pet, Dog breeding, Dog breeds, Dog Food, Personalized Dog Collars"> </head> See the <title> and </title> tag above? The words between those two tags are your site’s title. In this case, its Joe’s Dog World Web Site. Since the spiders check this and use what they find to help determine where to list your site at the search engines, you should use your keywords in your title. For this site, I would use something like this as my title: <title>Dog World - Dogs, Dog Training, Dog Health, Dog Toys, Pet, Dog breeding, Dog breeds, Dog Food, Personalized Dog Collars </title> Do you see how I used the keywords from my keyword meta tag in the title? You should do this same thing. The spiders also look at the text content of your site. They look at all the words on your web page. We call the words on your web page it’s "copy". So incorporate your keywords throughout your site’s copy. Link Popularity Many search engines will also look at how popular your site is and take that into account when determining how high up the list to rank your site. How do they determine how popular your site is? They look at how many other sites are linking to you. Their spiders, when checking a web site, also check all the links on the web site. If lots of other sites are linking to your site, the spiders will determine your site is more popular. In my opinion, that’s a little silly, but that’s what the search engines do. As a new web site, you may not have many other sites linking to your site. The way to fix this is to post on message boards and guest books across the Internet. Find message boards where people discuss topics similar to your site. Jump into any conversations on the message boards, or start your own conversations. At the end of each message you post, put a link to your web site. Next submit those message board pages to the search engines. The search engines will send their spiders to those message boards, see your links to your site, and give your own site a higher link popularity! The Most Important Search Engine Optimization Tip You’ll notice that everything so far has had to deal with your keywords. Using them in the keyword meta tag, using them in your site’s title, and using them throughout your site’s copy. That’s because the keywords you choose are the most important part of search engine optimization. You have to pick the right keyword or all your work will be for nothing. Why is this? Let’s say you choose a keyword that no one searches for at the search engines. If no one searches for that keyword, then no one will see your site listed at the search engines and therefore no one will come to your web site! But HOW do you know which keywords will attract the most people? If you knew that, then you could make a fortune right? If you knew how many times per month that someone searched for a certain keyword at the search engines, you could use that keyword throughout your site’s meta tags, site title and site copy, and therefore get listed at the search engines under that keyword, and therefore get a whole lot of site traffic. Right? Yes, that’s right. You must choose keywords that get searched for often at the search engines. Period. There’s one tool out there that actually shows you how many times any particular keyword gets searched for. This tool is priceless, and you simply have to have it in order to pick the right keywords. It’s actually part of a search engine submission software (so you can kill two birds with one stone). It’s called the Submission-Spider and it will allow you to:
There’s also other cool stuff in the software, but we don’t need to really talk about it because it doesn’t pertain to this. Anyway, you need to get a hold of a copy of this software asap. It’s got everything you need to optimize your site correctly, and to submit it to all the major search engines correctly. Plus it costs a fraction of the amount of most major search engine submission software out there, which in themselves are a fraction of the cost of hiring a professional to do this stuff for you. It’s priced at $99 on the main Submission-Spider.com web site but you can get it at over half that price at: http://www.SubmissionPro.com Where you can get it for only $39.90 I don’t know how long that discount sale price will last so you should head over there right away and take advantage of it. Believe me, you’ll get many many times the cost of the software out of it in site traffic from the search engines. Where else can you get something that will provide unlimited traffic to all your web sites forever for less than 40 bucks? The software comes with free tech support. These guys are great, and will help you promote your site with their software. They make sure you get listed at the search engines using the software. You can use the software on all your sites forever. Buy it now, it’s probably even tax deductible as a business expense. Some Search Engine Submission Pitfalls To Avoid There are some things to steer clear of. Most of these things won’t pertain to you, but I thought I would discuss them anyway just to be sure. Spam. Search Engines hate spam. How does one spam the search engines? Well for one, by listing hundreds and thousands of keywords in your keyword meta tag. Search engines frown upon this.
Keywords can be single words like dog or phrases like dog collars. Phrases can be counted as one keyword when determining how many keywords to list….so "dog collars" would be counted as one keyword. Another way to spam the search engines (and this is the big one) is to submit your site to the search engines dozens of times per day. Some people set up programs that will submit their sites thousands of times a day hoping to get listed higher. The only thing these people will get is banned from the search engines! Submit your site once or twice a month (I recommend once every 3 weeks) and you will have nothing to worry about. If you’re using a professional tool to do all your search engine submission like the Submission-Spider you won’t have anything to worry about. Some people claim that submitting your web site to the search engines by hand works better than using software to do it. By submitting by hand, I mean physically going to each search engine with your web browser, reading through their pages of terms and conditions and rules, finding their submission pages, then filling out the long submission forms by hand. Back in the dark ages of the internet this used to be true because search engine submission software was crude (this was several years ago). Now though it’s completely false. Search engine submission software has advanced by leaps and bounds since then. Now, submitting your web site using software is no different than doing it by hand as far as the search engines are concerned, and its much quicker, and much easier on you. Plus if you use software to submit your site, you know that you’re doing it correctly. As a final thought on search engine submission I would like to say this. Is search engine submission the end all be all of web site promotion? No it’s not. You’ll want to focus more on other methods mentioned in this book. But search engine submission is certainly something that you’ll want to keep a handle on. That’s why I recommend picking up software to handle all the search engine submission stuff for you, so you’ll be free to work on other aspects of promotion. Get your site listed, spend a few days each month monitoring it and maintaining your listing, but don’t focus completely on it and neglect some of the other tactics from this book.
Conclusion And there you have it. You’ve just learned the basics of Web Promotion. If you put these techniques to use, you will be able to successfully promote any web site on the Internet. None of these techniques are quick or easy, but not much in life is. If you devote the time to carrying out most of the techniques in this book, you will have a firm footing on which to build. After you’ve mastered the tips in this book, you’ll be able to easily move into more advanced web promotion tactics. As a final tip, let me give you one piece of advice. Find other web promoters out there with more knowledge and experience than you currently have. Get to know these people. Find a mentor. You need someone who you can turn to and ask web promotion questions along the way. You’ll always have questions, and the more advanced web promotion tactics change quite often. You need someone or a group of people you can bounce ideas off of, and get advice from. And now for a shameless plug on my part. I’m currently selling software that allows you to connect to our group of experts (myself included) 24 hours a day, to ask questions and get answers from real people who have years of successful experience promoting web sites. The software is called Marketers In A Box. It’s like having an entire marketing staff at your disposal. The group is not just made up of web promotion experts, there’s also:
Marketers In A Box is a community of experts, all ready to answer your questions and help guide you to Internet success. Other Marketers In A Box Users often help out too. Our open forum gives everyone the chance to share ideas and get feedback on anything and everything. Making a living on the Internet is tough enough. You can use all the help you can get along the way. I hope you’ll turn to our group of people who have been making their livings online for several years for advice. To learn more about my Marketers In A Box Program go here: http://www.eNetwire.com/miaB I hope to see you there! Please excuse my shameless plug, but well, I couldn’t resist J Summing Up I hope you enjoyed my book. I wish you online success! Be sure to check out the appendixes that follow for lists of helpful resources that will make your web promotion easier, as well as another free gift I’m sure you’ll enjoy.
Appendix A… Checklist of Web Promotion Techniques Have you done each of these things?
Appendix B… Ezine Resources (places to find ezines on any subject) In this appendix I’ve listed a number of directories of ezines. You can use these web sites to find ezines on just about any subject imaginable. Many of them also have contact information for the ezines (so you can contact their editors about getting your articles posted) and some also have ad price information so you can learn how much it costs to advertise in them. http://ezine-universe.com/ Email Newsletter directory http://list-universe.com/ Email List Publisher Resource Network http://www.list-city.com/ Contains a list of ad rates and contact info for hundreds of ezines http://www.newsletter-directory.com/ 1,000’s of ezines listed http://www.freezineweb.com/ Good detailed info on wide range of ezines. http://www.ezine-news.com/ http://www.fun-lists.com/ Good directory of ezines. Each ezine rated with star system by site visitors (5 stars best – 4 stars good etc) http://www.ezine-marketing.com/
Appendix C Web Site Resources In this appendix I’ve listed a few of the various resources that I mentioned in this book. Google.com My favorite search engine. It’s the first place I go whenever I’m looking for anything on the Internet. SubmissionPro.com They sell, in my opinion, the best search engines submission software on the Internet. CgiResources.com You can find a large variety of CGI scripts for your web site here, including Message Boards and scripts to help create and manage your own ezine. eNetwire.com/miaB Marketers In A Box Software. Get web promotion advice and help here. Market-Tek.com My main web site.
Appendix D Free Gift, Complete Resell/Distribution Rights To This Book! As a special free gift for reading this book, I’d like to give you Resell/Distributor Rights to this book. What that means is that you can upload the book to your own web site, and sell it for any price you want (you keep all the profits) or you can give it away for free as a special free gift to your own site visitors. Enjoy these Resell/Distributor Rights with my compliments! If you have any questions about uploading the book to your web site or setting up your site to allow your own visitors to download it, feel free to email me anytime at
Best wishes, and thanks for reading, John Skorczewski http://www.Market-Tek.com
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