Web Page Promotion
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.
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
lots 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 guidelines will 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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