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Keep your Site Open All Hours

Part two of our three part guide to help you maximise traffic to your website from day one. Online visibility is crucial for new and returning visitors and a vital means of promoting the site in order to sustain and increase numbers.

Part 2 - Online Visibility

All the directories, forums, blogs and social media that abound on the Internet is available to get people looking at your site and finding out more about you, your organisation, business, products, services and views. Keep it updated with content that is relevant to your audience or niche area and people will keep coming back.

Submissions

Submitting your site to the various search engines and directories is not difficult. You can submit to the most popular search engines by using a site such as Addme. For business and specialist directories you can use a submission application tool or create your own list by searching for the ones that are most relevant to your audience and build a list from the results. Create the brief content that you'll be asked to submit from your title, description and key copy before hand. Stay consistent with the categories you choose and the terms you use to describe yourself.

Articles and White Papers

The main reason why website owners love article marketing is because it's an effective way of building long term traffic to a website. When you do article marketing, you're writing articles on the general topic of your website, and then submitting the articles to article directories and other online publishers. So, as more and more publishers pick up your article, you build more and more links.

News

Update your news section with articles and submit anything newsworthy to online PR feeds and your local press. You can utilise niche news feeds direct to your site or create a personal list of favourite news sources and create your own bulletins relevant to your interests.

Start to build a subscriber list

Use your news, articles, reports and whitepapers to build a subscriber list. Building a list doesn't have to be too complicated. Set up an auto-responder and have a place to store and mange the data easily, so you can update and send subscriber content quickly.

PPC Advertising

Pay-per-click search engine advertising allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by "bidding" for keywords related to your product or service.
If you know what you're doing PPC advertising can be really useful for bringing in visitors in quickly from day one. A word of warning though, PPC is a minefield and expertise in optimizing spend, relevance, bidding and writing is best left to a specialist to ensure you don't break the bank paying for unqualified traffic.

Besides the big three offerings, there also smaller PPC search engines such as bidvertiser.com, enhance.com, search123.com and findwhat.com, where you could put you could test at a reasonable cost. You can also buy ad and banner space on ezines, directories and newsletters relevant to your targeted traffic.

Social Media

If you're an aficionado of blogging you'll know the importance of being linked to as many high profile blog directories as possible, having bloggers you interact with to provide a link to you and having your blog on your site. Look for high traffic blogs in your niche area and add feedback or comments directly linked to your area of expertise. This works best with show and tell solutions or tutorials you provide on your site.

Test Products and Answer Back

If you visit discussion boards and forums in your niche, you will have access to products people want tested. Test products, provide testimonials and if you're impressed, add a link to that product as a resource and ask for a link back to you. You can also use your specialist knowledge to reply to posts in Yahoo Answers.

Personalised Email Launch Intro with an offer, report or white paper

Send a personal email to every one in your contacts list telling them about the new site and adding a link to it, include a Send to Colleague link and add an incentive on the site, like a free article or report to start your subscriber list.

Email signatures

Put together a standard format for email addresses that every staff member must use on every email send from the company or organisation. Add a line promoting the website to the bottom of your this signature - then every email you send to someone whether they are friends, family or even your accountant will be made aware of the website. You can expand on this by adding a tag line and changing it every so often. For the launch you may simply use "visit our new website" and then after a few weeks change it to something more directly related to the products and services offered.

Part 3 Offline Promotion

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