Whats a good website promotion strategy for your online business?

Really a complex question to ask, but one that everyone has to consider and which should be high up on your list of priorities for your online business. There are new website promotion strategies being conceived and introduced all the time. It can be hard to keep up with them in this fast paced and rapidly changing online environment but in order to succeed online it benefits you to be familiar with as many as you can without overloading yourself and not getting the maximum from your efforts.

Promoting your online business is a non-stop endeavor – never forget that. Before you start any promoting you should spend a little time developing a site promotion plan. With a plan you at least have a written guide to help you follow through on your marketing and not continue to do a hit-and-miss technique.

Myself, I use a spreadsheet that list the strategies I use on a regular basis, semi-regularly and those that need to be done infrequently. I set this up on a 31 day cycle so that I can check off when I have completed that strategy.

You don’t have to limit it to once a week, etc. I sometimes use a strategy several times a week if I feel that it’s doing some good. The first thing you may need to do is clarify in your mind what exactly is a website promotion strategy and what are you going to use it for.

It is, more or less, a method or tactic you use to advertise your online business. There are literally hundreds of ways to promote your website on and offline but a lot of them may only produce minimal results and you end up wasting your time researching the Net for strategies on how to promote your web site that don’t really work.

Successful strategies for website promotion are the ones that produce results on a consistent basis and which can be monitored and fine tuned as needed.

Some strategies include -

*SEO
*Add good content
*Newsletters and RSS feeds
*Posting to forums
*Posting classified ads
*Email Marketing
*Reciprocal linking
*Creating backlinks
*Submitting your site to SE’s
*Submitting your site to directories
*Joint Ventures
*Running Affiliate programs
*Banner advertising
*Social bookmarking

Those are only a few of the hundreds of strategies available. When it comes down to it, website promotion is really about advertising and creating visibility for your site.

The more visibility – the more traffic you are likely to receive and thus the more sales you are able to make. Now I can’t cover all of the possible strategies in this one single article but I’m going to cover what I consider one of the most important methods to bring traffic to your site on a consistent basis.

If your going to put any effort into tuning up your website promotion strategy I would highly suggest that you spend as much time as possible on creating backlinks to your site.

Here’s what I mean….

**Backlinks

Backlinks, or one way links from one site to another, have become a major importance for ranking well in the search engines and for bringing in traffic to a site.

When search engines rank your site they place a lot of importance on how many websites are linking to yours. If those websites happen to be highly ranked, authority type sites, it gives extra credence for you in the rankings.

Not only that, but most backlinks are permanent or semi-permanent in nature and can last for years if not forever. Every website linking to you is like a mini salesman that sends you traffic you didn’t have to work for – it’s all basically FREE traffic.

A good backlink creating website promotion strategy would be to always shoot for creating a backlink from a higher PR ranked site than yours. So if your a PR2 site you would want to gain a backlink from a PR3 or higher site in order to have the search engines view the backlink to your site as coming from an authority site.

It’s not rocket science and only requires you to put in a little effort finding good sites that are relevant to yours and then finding if you can add your site to it. Generally speaking, whether your just starting out or have an established site, you can begin your backlink strategy by finding general directories, article directories to add your link to or by posting comments to blogs and forums.

The backlink website promotion strategy works rather well to create visibility as well as increase visitors to your site and should be considered a great starting point. This is just one of the many website promotion strategies available. As I said earlier it’s important to develop a plan that you can use to improve your online business and that you can evaluate on a regular basis.