Rules of Web Site Promotion

Our working and continually evolving set of promotion rules.

• You can’t count on the search engines to promote a site.

  That means you need to make sure to hit them all.
  Pay particular attention to the directories. (ignoring yahoo unless you know that particular yahoo category pulls well – most don’t any more).

• You must use every available avenue of promotion you can afford:

  A hard aggressive reciprocal linkage program.
  Usenet, forums, and even local chat or irc channels.

• Subtle promotional programs.

  Small or large programs like free email or other program to support your users and encourage them to come back.
  Forums.
  There are numerous little programs you can run. Something to keep up a flow of communication from you to your users.

• Branding.

  Come up with something to keep users on your site longer. Name branding is becoming critical. When they think of your topic, you need them to think of you first, second, or third.

• Newsletter is a must, a must, you must produce a newsletter.

• User Relations. I list it 6, but it is what I feel is the #1 key to a successful site. Good user relations is what separates the long term successful site from those that don’t make it.
  It is also the most difficult. Once you get a reputation (a good one) that you support your users via email, your email will explode. It is difficult to keep up with it, but it goes so far to support your site it isn’t funny. I do 5 hours of email a day. Good user relations and email support forgives any short coming your site may have.

• Set a goal of creating one new quality page every “x” often. I shoot for one a day and hit that about 5 out of 7 days.