Web site promotion encompasses many activities. If you're creating a Web site for an existing business then your promotional efforts should include many offline efforts as well as online. In fact, online promotion is seldom as productive as offline promotion. People are inundated with online promotion every day and we tend to ignore such web site promotions.

However, if your company buys ads in print and broadcast media, your ad campaigns should include the URL of your Web site. All of your business' product labels, literature, sales forms, stationary, etc., should include the Web site URL. If your business orders promotional materials for trade shows or for salespeople to distribute to customers and prospects (such as coffee mugs, pens, ball caps, mouse pads, t-shirts, etc.) they should all be branded with the Web site URL just as they are with the company name and/or logo.

Authors often buy book marks and book plates to help promote their books. Any printed material you create to promote your book should also promote your Web site. For that matter, you should do whatever you can to get the Web site mentioned in the book. Don't worry about whether the site will exist in five years. If people see you had a Web site once, they may try to find any new site you've created.

Online Web site promotion is big business, but most Webmasters cannot afford to purchase banner ads or start up affiliate programs. It's bad form to send out unsolicited email or to flood the news groups with off-topic announcements (and such practices alienate potential customers anyway). P/R tools such as press releases are difficult to write and distribute, or costly if you hire someone else to provide them for you. But there are now some online P/R services.

High search engine rankings are therefore important. But these are not the only effective means you have of Web site promotion. There are some announcement forums you can use which will help in small ways and require little effort. For instance, the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.announce is moderated and accepts announcements about new Web sites as well as significant updates.

If you spend time surfing the Web then sign guest books and leave the URL for your Web site. The more guest books you sign, the more visible your Web site becomes, even if people don't actually click on the links.

If you participate in discussion forums such as mailing lists, news groups, or Web-based message boards, create a signature file which promotes your Web site. Keep it small, no more than 4-5 lines, and keep in mind that signatures are generally not welcome on Web-based boards but they often let you leave a link for your Web site. Don't just spam the forums, posting announcement after announcement. This alienates people and looks cheap and amateurish. If you don't participate in discussions then find other ways of promoting your Web site.

Banner exchanges promise Webmasters they'll bring your site new visitors. If that were true everyone would be joining many banner exchanges, but fewer than 5 per cent of the people who see your banners will actually click on them. In order to benefit from a banner exchange your Web site must already be generating traffic. The exchanges won't bring in people for you until they display your banners, and they won't display your banners until you get people to visit your Web site and view the exchanges' other banners.

If you can find a specialized banner exchange that focuses on your Web site's subject area, you'll be more likely to realize a benefit from joining that exchange once you start getting regular traffic. People are more likely to click on a specialized banner exchange than on a general exchange. General banner exchanges are beneficial to sites with a lot of traffic. When you get several hundred to several thousand visitors a day you can use that traffic to brand your Web site name (and/or URL) into people's minds by joining a general-purpose banner exchange. You should target your banner displays as much as possible but get your site name and URL out there where people will see it. The object is get people to remember who you are. They may come looking for you later when they want to find a site like yours (or they may recommend it to someone).

One method of increasing traffic to your Web site is to provide free content to other sites. That's easier said than done. But if you cannot find a suitable banner exchange for your field or topic, then think about creating one. Every Web site that joins your banner exchange will be linking back to your site (it's customary to put a text link underneath the banners for exchanges). This gives your site greater visibility, increases its link popularity, and gives the search engines more links to follow back to your site.

Another form of free content is to provide code for people to place search boxes on their Web sites. If you maintain a links directory (through a database) that can be searched, share it. Again, this will increase the exposure your Web site gets and the number of links back to your Web site.

Authors can also write book reviews and create book lists for other sites. If possible, ask the other site to mention your book. If people just see the book and author's name, a URL isn't absolutely necessary. They will now have something to search for if they are curious about you and what you have published.

Create a Webring. Many people misunderstand the benefits of webrings. A Webring will only increase the link popularity of one site: the Webring's home page, provided that page is not hosted on the Webring's servers. But a Webring acts like a specialized mini-directory. People will look at the links in the Webring to see if the other sites appeal to them. It's a navigational tool which brings a small amount of focused traffic to member sites. Webring code should be kept on a separate page, not the main index for a member site, and you should only join Webrings with fewer than 200 member sites (but a Webring with fewer than 50 member sites may have trouble generating traffic, so if you create your own, make sure you promote the ring and help it grow).

Businesses -- particularly small businesses -- often commit one fatal error that inflicts more devastating harm on their visibility than any other fatal error. They refuse to link to competitive Web sites. The World Wide Web is about connecting with other people of similar interests, not shutting them out. The majority of business owners and operators take the wrong approach to operating their Web sites. They seem to feel that once they get a visitor that visitor is there to stay. It's a customer whose loyalties can be controlled by pretending there are no competitors. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Walk into any successful business today and ask for a product or service they usually provide but cannot for some reason. Will the business owner recommend an alternative source for you? Very often they will, and they do so because business people have learned that being helpful can bring potential customers back for other needs. Unfortunately, many businesses refuse to work with the Web, and they try to isolate themselves from their own communities. And then the owners wonder why their Web sites get no traffic.

To get good rankings in the search engines, it's more important than ever to get similar Web sites to link to your own. More importantly, a well-built Web promotion plan counts on more than search engine placement, print and television advertising, and signature files to persuade people to visit the Web site. Being linked to by similar Web sites -- COMPETITIVE Web sites -- gives a Web site instant credibility with surfers. People are more likely to visit a Web site they find links to everywhere than a Web site no one has ever heard of and that no one wants to link to. It's not so much that perception is reality as perception is the reality that a Web site operator must contend with. You give the wrong impression to potential customers if you pretend to be unique or exclusive on the Web. Any search engine or directory will instantly send surfers to sites whose operators have more common sense.

Finally, many Webmasters now include a link or mail form in their sites where visitors are encouraged to send email to friends or acquaintances asking them to visit the sites. These friendly notifications are deemed more acceptable than spam because people are getting messages from someone they actually know.

Michael L. Martinez

This document is copyright © 2000-2001 by Michael L. Martinez and has been reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. No reproductions, electronic or otherwise, may be made without express permission, except as occurs through normal browser caching and search engine indexing.