How to promote a MAINSTREAM SITE (article)
 

Unless your site has a lot of organic buzz (ie., offering a necessary but free service or has unique NOVELTY appeal), you probably will need to spend money on advertising.

PPC or paid placements are the first things that come to mind. Pro: qualified/targeted traffic if you know your target keywords. Con: your targeted keyword may not get much clicks per month (which may be OK since you pay per click and hence, will spend less).

The other alternative is FREE traffic. You can generate FREE traffic by

SEO. Pro: free and targeted. Con: very minimal results if you're not up to date on your SEO skills. Another drawback: traffic is not immediate

Blogs. Related to SEO above. Having many blogs that discuss your product/service means many linkbacks using high value links (keyword/anchor text with link). Depending on how your blogs do, you might get direct traffic. Con: Traffic is usually not immediate.

Forum promotions. Pro: fast traffic and high targetted. Con: very labor-intensive and you have to find forums related to your product/service's niche. Requires writing skills.

Press Releases. Many PR sites like PRNewswire have free versions.

Article submissions. Pro: Helps with SEO and also helps with direct traffic. Con: You have to write a lot of articles on an almost daily basis.

RSS submissions. Same general benefits/cons as articles.

Another method: ebooks.

Summary: It's mandatory that you a) research your target market and find where they are on the Net b) take out paid ads for market research and demographic profiling purposes. Once you can get a "psychographic" of your market and where they are located on the Net, go whole hog on FREE promotions.

Although the FREE traffic generation methods may seem daunting, all of these can be done if you have enough FOCUS and DETERMINATION. If you get overwhelmed, you can outsource these tasks out to one person so you can focus on building more sites to promote or finetuning your sites' conversion ability.

thanks for making this thread, i almost forgot to send you that email :1orglaugh

btw, great post

Thanks, bro. I'll probably add more to this post later.

but yo honestly.. I'm so lazy I'll probably just email you tomorrow... I'll just make a Text doc on my desktop named "email gene"

:1orglaugh my laziness knows no boundaries


bump for a great thread

Thanks for those great tips! :thumbsup

good tips :thumbsup
im not looking forward to writing alot of articles though.
:helpme

interesting you brought ebooks into this.. are u talking the exe kind or the pdf kind?

Exe works best cuz it allows you to pw protect, add monthly updated content, html pages, pw protected pages, flash animation, etc etc.

Nice article Gene.