Billions of pages on the internet – That’s your competition. Think about your daily visits; which sites you visit on a regular basis to get your news, stock quotes and other information. My guess is that your regular visits can be counted on your fingertips. So how do you, the entrepreneur help people navigate to the newest addition to the web? The latest and greatest site that everyone should know about but nobody is visiting due to poor visibility? There are several key maneuvers you can make to market your new site and attract people to your site even before it’s ready for launch.
- Blog, Blog and More Blog – The first successful maneuver is to create blogs based on as many facets of your business as possible. Keep an inventory in an Excel spreadsheet of your blog locations, usernames and passwords. It’s important to try a few different blogs and see which ones pop up on the major search engines the fastest. Those are the ones you’ll want to focus your efforts on the soonest. Even if you’ve never heard of a blog, it may be spidered regularly and an important addition to your blog repetoire.
- Comment, Comment, Comment – Another great way to get your name out there is to use somewhat of a secret way to backlink your website. A backlink is just a link on another person or company’s website. Do a search for blogs related to your product or service. Visit those blogs and post as many free comments as you can. Usually you can add a comment without having it be pre-approved, it just depends on the popularity of the site or personality of the blogger. Make sure your comments are relevant to the blog and only include one link per comment. Sometimes a blog will have several postings that you can comment on. Usually three comments is sufficient per blog.
- Write, Write, Write – Articles are an important way to not only add credibility to your own personal talents, but it also adds credibility to your website, plus the ever important backlink from a highly spidered source. Write as many articles as you like. Keep them relevant and at around 500 words. This way, people will be more apt to read your article and possibly follow any links you may have included, which at least one should be to your website.
- Act Larger Than You Are – The great thing about the internet is that you can be a small startup from the couch of your studio apartment in Fresno, California. This doesn’t mean your website has to look like it. If you’re not a great designer, find someone who is. If you’re not a great coder, find someone who is. Put together a team of people who have the same ambition as you and make your new site appear like it’s the Google of your niche. If your site has not launched yet, be sure to have a pre-launch registration page available and possibly a sign-up for beta testers to make sure your code is tight.
These are just a few examples. I’m sure you have other ideas of your own, but you’ll want to make sure that you do more than just submit your site to search engines. In today’s internet climate, that’s no longer enough.
