Website Promotion / Advertising

Unless your website's for personal use only, you'll want to advertise it. There are many different methods of letting the world know about your creation, including:

• Search Engines
• Banners / Link Exchange schemes
• Direct Mail / Email
• Offline Advertising

Search Engines are the main way that people find websites - see the page on Search Engines for more info.

• Paid Search Engine Ads.
  You can advertise directly on some search engines. Overture was the pioneer of Cost-Per-Click advertising. Google now has the 'AdWords' program which displays a small ad to the right of a set of search results, depending on the keywords used in the search. This is an elegant & cost-effective solution.
  
  
• Banner Exchange
  These schemes are where, in return for displaying a banner advertising someone else's website on yours, they host a banner on their website advertising yours. There are a lot of intricacies in this, and a great many available schemes.
  
  
• Direct Mail
  ...or Email is where you mail people and tell them about your website. Sending unsolicited email is called 'Spam', and is bad manners at the least. Spam is also a fairly ineffective method of sales because, far from pleasing your potential customers, you may really annoy them! If you collect email addresses on your website, e.g. through an autoresponder which sends a free report, or a guest book, use them thoughtfully. Direct mail is way more expensive as you have to send out physical letters, but some people do use this as an effective and profitable method of getting traffic and sales.
  
  
• Offline advertising
  ...whether in magazines, billboards, or even bumper stickers can be a good method of getting traffic. It can be expensive though, and most traffic on the internet comes from the search engines (or affiliates!).
  
  If you do decide to advertise offline - the following could save you a lot of money:
  
  • Space in magazines and papers is sold by the column centimeter.
  • 2 column centimeters in the Daily Mirror has a rate card price of about £220+VAT
  • No-one ever pays rate-card price except rank novices! (30-60% is acceptable.)
  
  

Best of luck! Please let us know if you find any really great advertising opportunities.

The Internet Marketing Centre... is Corey Rudl's world famous website. He is a recognised master of marketing - his sites pull-in over $4million every year in sales.

If you want to know how he does it, click here to visit the IMC.