Effective Website Promotion Techniques

If you visit enough online marketing forums you'll see that one of the most common themes is "website promotion". Everyone wants to know what is the most effective website promotion technique or strategy.

My objective in this article is to effectively lay out the plan that I followed that has worked for me and I believe will work for any site that is intending to make money. Let me first summarize what I want to cover and then I'll backtrack into each topic:

• Clearly identify who your customer is
• Effective layout of your website
• Select the right keywords and phrases
• Quality content
• Integrate Adsense ads
• Update your site regularly

Now let's begin by identifying who your customer is. Many inexperienced internet marketers try to reach out to as many people as possible believing that this will give them the best chance for success. This is the equivalent of tossing wet noodles on the kitchen wall and seeing which ones will stick. To effectively promote any site you efforts need to be concentrated and directed towards the right target. The narrower the target the better. For example, if you are marketing a weight loss system or product you should be able to visualize your customer. What is the gender, age, economic or educational background? All this information will help you increase your chances of effectively reaching them with your website promotion technique. If you identify this customer as a young mother who is struggling to lose weight immediately after having her baby you'll go after her differently than you would a male in his mid forties. See the difference? They will each have different reasons and degrees of motivation for wanting to lose weight.

Once you've identified your customer now you can begin to construct the layout of your website. Think of each page as a different section of a department store. Each one has something different to offer and yet they work together to make the shopping experience a satisfying one. Let's take a closer look. Once again we'll use our weight loss customer. Your landing page should be somewhat like a resume - it should be able to capture the visitors attention long enough to assure them that they are in the right place. Give a brief summary of all the things you have to offer and what makes you qualified to recommend the product or service that is listed on your site

The accompanying pages of your site will serve as a supporting cast. Once the customer is assured they are in the right place gently guide them to the important "accessories" that can help them accomplish their goal of losing that undesired weight.

For example, you may be able to include pages with the following tags:

• Diet reviews
• Latest medical findings
• Expert articles and subscriptions
• Patches
• Pills
• Health foods
• Organics
• Diabetic center

You get the picture? You don't want your visitor to struggle once they arrive at your site. Make it easy for them to find what they came for. Again, this is all part of effective website promotion. Rest assured, if you do this well each visitor will now become a referral center for you. Now that you have identified the right sections for your website you must now carefully select the best keywords to label these sections. This is extremely important because if you don't it will kill everything else that you have done right so far. To help in this matter you will need to get a hold of a keyword research tool so this doesn't turn into a laborious step. I have used several and mention them on my site. Such a tool will let you type in the name of a successful competitor and display for you which keywords they are using.

Many of these sites actually use hundreds of keywords in their meta tags. You want to select the ones that will yield a high page rank with little competition. In my personal projects I look for a keyword that has a page 1 or page 2 ranking and less than 20 competitors. Stay away from keywords that are extremely popular. Also, you will be better off using "key phrases" because people type in entire phrases not one or two words when doing a search. The more words in your phrase the more targeted the customer you will get and the more likely you will be able to convert them. This assumes of course that you have what you alluded to with the phrase you included in your meta tags.

Now that you have selected the best keywords to name your web pages you are prepared to provide quality content for your visitors. In case you didn't know...CONTENT is still King on the internet. People what to convince themselves these days that they are naking a good purchase. Aggressive sales tactics rarely work. Give them as much information as possible. If you are not comfortable with or prepared to write a lot of good content you can either hire a freelance writer or refer to a good ezine website that provides great articles that you can post on these pages.

Once again, be sure that the article you post is populated with the keyword you selected for your webpage. So if one of your pages is labeled "diet pills" then this should be mentioned in the title of the article, the first paragraph as well as the last paragraph. Not too much however or you'll look tacky.

The last 2 phases of effective website promotion are fairly easy. I always recommend that you monetize your website. AdSense ads are the best in this effort. If you don't have an AdSense account then go to Google now and sign up for one - it's free and easy. Remember that you will only get to convert a small percentage of your visitors. Even you can achieve twice the industry average of 2-3 percent you want to capitalize each visit. Why not make money from them as they are leaving?

Finally, to help your site in it's standing with the search engines you will need to frequently update your content. I do this each time I submit my site to the search engines. It typically takes me about 30-45 minutes once each month. If you follow this website promotion technique and are faithful and patient you will see results faster then you think, especially if you are new to this. By following this plan I was able to garner a page rank of 2 from Google after only 6 months. Good luck.