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by Sal Arora When you build a site, your challenge is more than just building the site—it's also building awareness, traffic, links from other sites, credibility, and relationships with visitors—all on a budget. Like you, I couldn't drop a cool two million and run an ad during the SuperBowl. I couldn't hire
an ad agency or buy banner ads on popular sites. I had to build my site the old-fashioned way—with a dream in my heart, a song on the radio, and a budget that wouldn't put a dent in my life! No matter what you do, it's important to stay realistic. Don't expect enormous traffic right off the bat. Be patient (I know that's hard!) and give your site time to grow and catch on. That won't happen by itself, though. You need to put as much effort into promoting your site as you did into building
it. Here's what I learned worked (and didn't), in order of importance.
Search engine registration is the first thing you should do when your site goes live. It's free, and for many sites it remains the single largest source of traffic. Doing some preparation work before you submit your site can help greatly. I created a
worksheet that contained a description of my site using a 10-word sentence, a 25-word sentence, a 50-word sentence, and then just a selection of words that most appropriately described my site. This can be a hard exercise (especially the 10-word sentence)—but it helps you focus and will make search engine registration faster and more effective. (It also can be a good exercise before you build your site to help you focus!) As soon as your site goes up, you'll start to receive e-mail
from companies that say things such as, "Pay us $99 and we'll get you onto the top ten of every search engine." Uh huh. If it really were that easy and inexpensive, then everyone would do it, and if everyone did it, they wouldn't all be in the top ten, would they? The most important things: Give each page on your site a detailed and specific title and use meta tags. To learn more about things you can do to help your placement on sites, see When you find a site you trust, with information you find useful, you tend to trust its links to other sites. These links also tend to take you to information you're interested in. This is because if you like a site, then you share some of the same interests as the person or people behind the site. Studies have shown that a large percentage of Web traffic is generated from links such as this and that, in some cases,
this can generate even more traffic than search engines. Also, since some search sites place your site according to how many other sites link to it, reciprocal links can help your site get more traffic from search sites, doing two things at once. I carefully searched for sites related to my site (which is about goings on in the San Francisco bay area) and narrowed that list to sites I thought would be most useful to my visitors. Then, I added a link to those sites and sent an
e-mail to the Webmasters requesting reciprocal links. You never really know what percentage of people you ask will either respond, or respond with a "yes," so the more you can find and ask, the better! The nice thing about reciprocal links is that they work both ways and everyone benefits. The trick is to choose the sites you link to carefully and be very focused about the subject matter. For example, if your site is about aquarium fish, look
for other sites about fish (excepting, probably, recipes :). Getting links on more popular, but general, sites may not be more effective than getting links on less-traveled sites that are more specific. E-mail the people who run the sites and ask if they'd like to trade links. Better yet, if you think their sites are good, link to them right away. Then you can e-mail and say, "I respect your site and have already linked to it. I'd appreciate it if
you'd take a look at my site and link to it, if you feel it merits it." Links also benefit your site visitors, and pages devoted to links are popular because they provide your site visitor with a "personally selected" group of sites that helps them find the information they want without having to sift through endless search engine pages. You can find more information about linking in the One service I found surprisingly useful was Web rings. A
Web ring allows member Web sites to band together to form a linked circle for the purpose of allowing more visitors to reach them quickly and easily. You can find more information at WebRing. I found Web rings to be effective because I could choose a focused group of sites to be part of my circle—and in effect
get a share of users who met my target profile. For example, I joined a Web ring dealing with wines in Napa—all of the other sites were of similar topic. That way, if someone is interested in a topic, he or she can follow the Web ring to more sites on the same topic.
Discussion lists, newsgroups, and community sites are also a good place to announce/promote your Web site. The key benefit to using them is that you will have an audience that is already interested in a specific topic. However, using the lists just for promotion can actually cause more harm than good because lists tend to have strong policies against pure or overt promotion. Here's the right way to use the lists: Establish your presence
on the list as someone who knows the specific interest area well. In the responses you post, you can have a signature at the end of your posting that points people to your Web site. Once you have established trust and credibility on a list, it will be easier to get away with promoting yourself once or twice. I learned this the hard way—in my eagerness to launch my site, I became too aggressive on discussion lists, and the feedback I got was overwhelmingly negative. However, once
I took a more helpful approach (with the only promotion being my signature), I could see the traffic to my site increase with every post. I was surprised at how effective "conventional" off-line marketing techniques were in driving traffic to my Web site. Personal networking Word-of-mouth can spread quickly on the Web. So one place to start is by talking to your friends and relatives. Not only
will you be able to get some immediate traffic but also get friendly feedback. In my first e-mail to my personal network, I asked them to visit my site, give me some feedback, and, if they thought someone else would be interested in the site, forward the e-mail to them. Very quickly I had people visiting the site and giving me feedback. You also can use your professional network to drive traffic to your site. The trick, of course, is to mention your Web site
URL every two minutes (just kidding—but you get the idea). Business stationery Make sure all of your business stationery carries your Web site URL—whether it's your business card, letterhead, or whatever. Everything you put in print should include your URL. You could even consider putting your URL on one of those magnetic signs that attaches to your car. Promotional material You also can use traditional promotional material to drive traffic to your site. For example, if you are a bookshop, put your URL on bookmarks. You also can use fliers, newspaper ads, radio commercials, etc. I gave a monthly prize to one of the members of the site (someone who'd visited and signed up for our e-mail newsletter)—a bottle of wine. It was a small gesture, but it always thrilled people to get a gift. That also helped spread the word. Site awards There are a number of sites that give "awards" to sites based on certain criteria. A search on Infoseek returns a number of award sites. It's best to find award sites that deal with the field you are in. For example, I found one site that awarded sites with a focus on food. The benefits for getting an award are in increasing your credibility as a trusted site and in increasing traffic.
The downside of site awards is that they can look cheap and tacky. Many sites created awards simply to drive traffic to their site, so as awards proliferated, they became less useful, more meaningless, and sometimes just plain annoying. An award from a large, recognized site, such as Britannica.com can add credibility (and traffic) to your site. But, naturally, getting one of these is harder (they have to find you and don't accept submissions).
Don't stick dozens of awards on your home page. That adds to loading time (which can turn people away) and looks cheap. Try for a few focused, good awards. Place one or two at most on your home page. Banner exchange I mention banner ads last because they were the least
effective for me. Here's how banner exchange works: For every visit to your site, ads for your site are shown on somebody else's site. There are two big problems with this. For one, to get a reasonable click-through rate (i.e., the number of times your ad is shown vs. the number of times somebody clicks on it), your ad has to be shown a humongous number of times (some statistics show one click-through for 500 showings—though I find that unreasonable, too,
especially for companies that are still establishing their brand). Second, you have limited control over where your ad is being shown. Even though most banner exchange engines try to target ads to the right audience, it is nowhere close to being ideal. However, one thing that banner ads do is add credibility to your site. All of the top brand sites are doing it—so why not you? Plus, some banner ads can be tied to affiliate programs, and earning some $$s over time is never a bad idea. Following is a checklist that contains a list of resources you can use to launch your site. The checklist mirrors the areas discussed in this article. For more marketing tips, see Mary Gillen's If you build it, will they come? About the author
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