Spread the Word about your Web Site or Blog
Just having a web site or blog is not enough. People need to know about it. Spreading the word about your blog or web site takes time and perseverance to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts.
Consider putting your web site and blog in email signatures, business cards, address labels, and letters. I have seen automobiles and trucks with web addresses on them…even t-shirts! A tattoo may be going too far.
Posting articles on news sites like Digg helps spread your URL around. It can be a lot of work (and luck) to get a big story on Digg. You never know.
Of course you can go crazy and post it on a billboard along a busy road.
Just mentioning your web site or blog URL in conversation may get some results especially if it is easy to remember. Often when I mention web sites people are taken aback: oh, you have a web site?
If you have a brick and mortar store, posting the web site near the entrance will bring some exposure. Printing your site on each receipt will get countless eyes looking at it. Offer a discount or some other incentive on the receipt along with a promotion code to track where it came from. Advertising your web site on grocery carts may be another idea. Local chambers of commerce generally have web site listings of area stores.
Leaving useful comments on a forum will instill credibility and hopefully people will seek you out. Putting a URL in a post may get tagged with a no-follow tag so search engines will not follow it…but people may.
If you have an email list, send out an announcement of your blog or an important posting on it. Many times people like to forward useful emails.
Link exchanges are popular but diminishing in value for search engines. Make sure the link you exchange is a quality link. You are known by the company you keep.
That is it for now. There are many other ways of letting the world know of your online presence. I’ll post another batch of ideas later…
Doug