Get Serious About Promoting Your Web Site

By Daryl Putnam

You've built your web site. You've validated, tweaked, optimized and made it as effective, perfect, and useful as possible. You've manually submitted to search engines and relevant directories. Your content is fresh, unique and free of spelling and grammatical errors. You've done everything that you should and yet your web site just sits there, languishing, in Internet obscurity.

We all know that without visitors/traffic there's little chance that your web site is going to accomplish the results you desire. We understand that we need visitors to sell our products or services and we know that it's not enough to rely on search engines to supply the traffic necessary for success.

So what's the secret? How do you get those all important visitors to your web site? Unfortunately their are no quick fixes or magic formulas, that I know of, but their are things that you can do. The first thing that you need to do is get serious about marketing your web site. Let's face it, your not going to have visitors if no one knows you exist. Forget about search engine optimization and start getting the word out. Your site's great, leave it alone and work on promotion.

Once you have decided to do some serious marketing the next thing that you should do is to decide on a strategy and start a marketing campaign. Their are three tried and true strategies that you can use to self-promote your web site that needs no additional software and is absolutely free. Those strategies are writing articles, writing press releases and link requests. In this article we are going to talk about link requests.

link requests In marketing the term popularity refers to sites of the same niche (sites that are relevant to the content of your web site) that link to you. Increasing your popularity is one of, if not the best, form of marketing your web site. So, sit down and write a link request.

Each link request should be as personalized as possible, but to save time, you could create a link request template. You can edit the appropriate information in the template for each request.
The request should be professional, courteous, and to the point. Compliment the webmaster on his or her site, tell them where you have placed their link on your site, where you would like them to place your link, thank them for considering your request and close.

Use the webmasters name When you find a site that you would like to link to you should familiarize yourself with the site. Search the site and find the webmasters name and include it in the subject line and the request. Dear Jim sounds a lot more personal than Dear Webmaster and it proves that you have actually spent time on their web site.

Use your name Introduce yourself immediately by giving your name. "Hi Jim my name is Daryl" makes the request more personal and more apt to be considered by the reader. If you have a business you can also include your phone number. You probably won't get a call but it gives your email much more credibility.

Give your contact information

Illegitimate email does not include contact information so be sure to include your email address and your URL. Let them know that you are eager to hear from them.

When you find a relevant site edit the appropriate information in your template, link to it, and then send the webmaster your link request. Make it as easy as possible for the webmaster to link to your site. If the webmaster has not responded to your request after a predetermined time remove his/her link from your web site.

Link managementAs the number of sites that link to you increases you may want to add a link management system. Link managers automatically check your reciprocal links and remove those that no longer link back to your site. You can find several really good link management scripts that are free to use.

To win you have to compete and to compete you have to get into the game. So send a link request to as many quality relevant sites as possible. The more requests you make, the greater your chances of success. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease". And don't be afraid to ask sites with a high page rank. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The higher the page rank of the site the greater the degree of importance. One link from a site with a rank of 7 is worth 100 with a rank of 0.

Daryl Putnam is the creator of the popular web site Web Essentials and other web based educational Internet sites. He is also the author of numerous authoritative articles on web design and development topics. To learn more about web site design and development visit Web Essentials.