Put Your Web Address On Everything
A fundamental method of offline site promotion is to ensure you put your website address onto every scrap of paper, every client CD, every invoice, contract, envelope, brochure and advertisement. The more eyes that view your web address, the more likely you can harvest visitors through passive advertising.
Partake In Forums
Forums are an excellent source of information, opinions and assistance when it comes to information. They’re also a great place to advertise your site. While most forums forbid blatant self-promotion (which keeps the forums interesting) most are not opposed to active URLS in your signature line. This gets your web address out there, and also helps develop search engine relevancy.
Blogs
Google and other search engines love Blogs. The content is fresh, very relevant and various linking mechanisms (RSS for example) are great for SEO. One warning – a Blog is very time consuming, and is only effective if constantly updated. Also, news Blogs tend to get much more traffic than niche Blogs – so be realistic in your efforts.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Sometimes effective. But almost always very expensive. Pay-per-click links are supplemental links that are added to main search results, and can usually be identified as “sponsored results” or “sponsored link”. The premise is quite simple – you bid on keywords, and the higher bids are served at the top of the most relevant search engine results. It can get very expensive in a hurry and the return on investment can be staggeringly low. Also, only the first few pay-per-click results (the highest bids) are effective as lower bids are only served on the third, fourth and fifth (etc) pages of the main search results.
Submit Your Site To Important Directories
An excellent way of creating more traffic to your site is to list yourself on various business directories such as Thompson, Yellow Pages and related industry websites.
Google views a listing of your site in these directories as an important “vote of confidence”. Therefore it’s imperative that you submit your site to these directories as soon as possible. Keep in mind that your site needs to be completed. *NEVER* use the words “under construction” on ANY page – this will notify search engines that your site is incomplete, hampering your efforts to get listed, and in true terms, every web site is always “under construction” anyway.
Other factors to be aware of – certain search engine waiting lists are in the months, and some charge commercial sites an “inclusion fee” of several hundred pounds.
