Promote
your Web Page
Welcome to the World Wide Web. If you already have a web
page, this page will help you to promote your web page so people can find your web page on the world wide
web. Please do note that this is no shortcut to instant search engine listing or web page ranking "booster",
but a mere help facility to get you going.
BACKGROUND
Now that you have a web page, you need to tell people about
it and get your business, service or product, out there so people can start browsing your web page. Depending
on the aim of your web page, this is where you will get people to either become involved in your venture, or
where people, every visitor to your web page, become a potential client.
If you have a business related web page, this means that
you now have an “office” open 24 hours a day in every household, business, internet café or other public
computer in the world that has access to internet. Now that is an exciting thought.
WEB SITE PROMOTION
Building exposure is the main aim when advertising your web
page; to draw visitors to your web page. We get offline promoting and online / e-promoting. Both these can be
very effective and cost-effective too if managed correctly. Let me share a few ideas with
you.
Offline Promoting
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Word of Mouth - Tell all your friends and tell
them to tell their friends.
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Give Out Leaflets - There's nothing wrong with
a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can. Remember though, not everyone
take time to read these. Just think of yourself. We all get stacks of adverts in our mail boxes on a
weekly, sometimes, daily basis. How many of those do you read?
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Business Cards - This should go without saying
I guess, but once you've gone through all the trouble to set up a website, don't forget to put your
e-contact details (web page and email address) on your business cards. After all, if you're relying on
them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option of reading more about you, your service
and or product on your website first.
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Promotional Gifts - This is also a smart way to promote your web page / business. Order some low
cost pens (for example) and print your web address on each pen and hand those out at malls, shopping
centres and or some traffic intersections. For both these you might need permission from the mall /
shopping centre management or your local traffic department, but it's worth a
try.
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Cell Phone Technology - SMS Messages can also
be very handy when promoting your web page. Send an SMS to all your friends and business contacts and
ask them to visit your web page, and then as them to forward that message to their friends and business
contacts. This is a quick and cost-effective way to let many people know about your web
presence.
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Promotions - If you have the kind of business
and or service that can accommodate competitions or incentive driven promotion campaigns, which is also
a way of getting noticed. This usually will go hand in hand with printed media and or even e-marketing.
See info below on how to deal with online and e-promoting.
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Advertising on the
move - Use your car, especially if your website is
area-specific (e.g. a website detailing local events or selling local services). Get some vinyl
decals or bumper stickers created and turn your car into a moving advertisement,
literally driving traffic to
your web site. Hey, why don't you fill your friend's car with petrol and give them a pair of
those vinyl decals to drive with it on his / her car until the car is
empty?
Online & E-Promoting
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Email - Add your URL to your signature so that
every email you send is an advertisement of your Web site. Don't SPAM people, however. Sending out mass
emails to announce your site is annoying and some ISPs will cancel your account for that type of
action.
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Freebees - We all love freebees don't we ? To give away some freebees is always a good
way to promote your web page. Most Cell phone server providers in South Africa nowadays have prepaid
options. Why not buy a lot of those ( and they come really cheap these days ) and give them away as
freebees? Use feedback forms or online competitions to draw people to your site and reward them with
freebees like this. Be inventive, you will find more ideas if you just start thinking around this
topic.
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Banner Ads - You can create banners promoting
your site and ask other people to link to you.
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Link exchanges - If you see a site that is
related to yours, write to the author and ask to exchange links.
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Tip: There are many more of
these. To find them, go onto any search engine and type in a phrase
like "submit url" or "submit your page" or even "web page submission", and you will find lot's of
possibilities. Please do note that although most page submissions are FREE of charge, some sites might
require some form of payment or even end up flooding you with spam mail. So be cautious. If you are not sure,
rather move on to the next option. Also remember to submit your web page only ONCE to each search engine.
Submitting it more than one will not increase your ranking, and some search engine moderators will even
delete your submission request if it reoccurs in their database.
Just a final thought. Submitting your web page URL to
search engines does not guarantee instant hits. It can take sometimes up to six weeks for your URL to be
added to the search engine database & crawler info, but the number of hits you get on your page, that
will push up your page ranking; also with time. Be patient; understand that search engines need a lot of time
to index a new web site and domain. In fact, they need time to index all your
content
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Search Engine
Ads - If you have some extra cash lying around, you can
also opt to buy some search engine ads. This however can be costly and not always that effective,
because your ad will be toggled around the web along with 1000's of other
ads.
Although Dumelang
Media Services does not do web page promotions for clients, we hope that these guidelineswill help you along to successfully promote your
web page both on- and offline. Your comment and suggestions are also welcome, so please get in touch with us
if you have valuable info we can add to this page to help other clients. Feedback and suggestions are always
welcome.
Warning :
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Never, ever spam. Your credibility
will be gone before you know it, and with it will go your traffic and all potential
traffic.
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Do not be fooled by those so called
traffic sellers promising thousands of hits an hour. What they really do is load up your URL in a
program, along with a list of proxies. Then they run the program for a few hours. It looks like
someone is on your site because your logs show visitors from thousands of different IPs. What
happens in reality is your website is just "pinged" by the proxy, no one really sees your site.
It is a waste of money.
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