Website Promotion

This article is divided into seven sub-sections which include the following:

Introduction

Regardless of how much time and money you may spend in developing your website, if nobody knows it's there then your efforts will be wasted.

Hopefully this article can help to explain some of the best ways to promote your online venture through a number of options and increase your traffic, which in turn, if relevant will increase your business.

We'll look at a number of different options including, Google AdWords, search engine submission, affiliate programs, banner exchanges and various others, hopefully you can find a method of promotion that will help your website grow. An index of these pages can be found here

Google Ad Words

Google as i'm sure you know is the most widley used search engines on the net, currently listing over 3 billion websites and being viewed more than 200 million times a day.

Many people make use of googles services several times a day, some even use google as their homepage and one major benefit of promoting your website through googles advertising options is that the vast majority of people using it are actively looking for something, that something could well be a product or service that you offer so you need to stand out from the thousands of other websites offering the same.

What are AdWords?

When you perform a search on google, you'll see a number of text based ad boxes on the right hand side these are google adwords, and you'll notice they are always related to the term you searched for. You can't really miss them, they are designed to stand out and catch the eye.

How do they work?

Googles AdWords are a form of cost-per-click (CPC) advertising, so you only pay for the clicks you recieve. There's the option to set a daily budget and a minimum startup investment of only $5 so you don't need to worry about laying out huge amounts of money with no guarantee of success.

Your adverts are triggered by a number of keywords that you specify when creating your account, so it's easy to target your ads directly at the people that are searching for terms related to your product or service.

Tips for better results

Some things to consider if you're looking at google ad words to promote your website.

Make full use of the flexibility allowed in your ads. - If you're running a promotion or special offer, use this in your advert to make sure you stand out from the others.
Target your keywords carefully. - Lets say your business is offering computer accessories, using a keyword like "computers" in your ad words campaign is going to mean your ads displayed to only a small percentage of people looking for computer accessories, as people searching the term "computers" could also be looking for computer games, repairs, sales and other services, you'll get far better results by using direct keywords like "computer accessories" or even words relating to individual items you sell.
Prepare your website. - If you are promoting a particular offer or product in your adwords campaign, make sure that it can be easily found on your site when people click your ad.

Visitors don't want to spend 5 minutes searching your site for the offer they came looking for it needs to be clearly visible as soon as they arrive, else there's nothing to stop them going back and clicking somebody elses ad, leaving you out of pocket.

To summarise, Google AdWords is one of the most effective ways of directly targetting the people that are searching for the services you offer, it's very flexible and very simple to manage. More information can be found at adwords.google.com