SelfPromotion.com
If you want more people to visit your website, you must know how to create search engine friendly websites, and then submit your URL to all the major search engines. That's what this site is all about.
SelfPromotion.com is the net's leading resource for do-it-yourself Web Promotion. Here you will find all the information and automatic submission tools you need to do the job quickly, efficiently, and most of all, properly! If you invest a little time into reading and using this resource, you'll not only do a much better job of promoting your site, but save yourself a lot of time and effort in the process.
And best of all, it's FREE. If you feel the site is useful, then pay me what YOU think the advice and service is worth! And if you ever change your mind for any reason, you get your money back -- no questions asked.
The grey navigation palettes on the right side of each page let you quickly bounce around the site. Start by reading this page, which will introduce you to the basics of site promotion.
Then, when you're ready to start promoting your site, use the Create New Account form (just below this text on the right-hand side) to get started registering your site around the Net!
Click Here to Visit SelfPromotion.com
Site promotion is really not that difficult. It just takes a little bit of effort, a little bit of thought, and a fair amount of patience. It is crucial to understand that site promotion is a long-term, low-intensity effort. It can take months to get into the search engines, and years to develop a site that gets top rankings. So don't be overwhelmed by all the tutorials and tips on this site; you don't have to do all of this overnight. The #1 mistake people make is rushing! Take your time, slow down, read the articles, think about how they apply to your website, and then proceed. Here's a summary of my "11 step" program:
If you're selling something, make sure you're selling the right thing. The internet is a great tool for selling things, but there's a big gotcha. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition two ways; first, it's going to be a lot harder to get noticed on the search engines, and second, the competition is going to eat away at the profits.
The real secret to making money on the net is to sell something that nobody else is selling. Even if the market is tiny and obscure, if you're the only maker, the net will bring you and your customers together. If you sell cowboy boots, you might have problems getting noticed, but if you specialize in cowboy boots for people with six toes, you'll make money.
Furthermore, if you're trying to make money with an affiliate program, in particular those that automatically generate a "virtual" website for you, you should know that in almost all cases, they are a waste of time and money. I've written an article,
Virtual Vexation, that explains why. I get emails all the time from people who have wasted hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the schemes. Please do not be one of them.
Get your site working properly. It doesn't matter how many people you attract to your website if, once they get there, they immediately get turned off by an unattractive presentation or a half-built website. I assume you're already happy with how your site looks, but you may want to read my article on
how to (not) win awards, which contains a list of website mistakes you should try to avoid.
Choose keywords and tweak your site for the search engines. Once your site looks good to humans, the next step is to try to make it look good to the search engines, so you get the coveted high ranking. This involves choosing the right keywords and adjusting your page title, meta tags and first paragraph to showcase them. This is where most webmasters screw up. They choose the wrong keywords because they don't spend enough time thinking about how people are going to try to find them. My article on
search engine optimization takes you step-by-step through this process.
Submit to the major search engines. Now that your site is all ready, you next submit to all the major search engines. One of the key components of SelfPromotion.com is an extremely powerful and comprehensive automated submission tool that can properly promote your site to all the major search engines and indexes. The good news is that it'll only take you about 10 minutes to create an account and promote to the search engines. The bad news is that it can take anything from hours to months for the major search engines to list your site, and Google in particular is giving new sites reduced ranking for the first few months.
Fortunately, while you are waiting for the search engines to get their act together and list you, there are other things to do.
To learn how to create an account and use the promotion tool, please read the
site submission tutorial, also known as "A Boy and his Website".
Submit to the major indexes. While SelfPromotion.com will submit your site to a ton of places, it does not autosubmit to the major indexes such as Yahoo and Open Directory. The reason is that listings in these indexes are sufficiently valuable that a hand-done, optimized submission is worth taking the time to craft.
Yahoo is the most important place to have your site listed on the Internet, yet most Yahoo listings are awful. Once you understand how to craft a proper submission to Yahoo, you'll not only greatly increase your chances of getting in, but you'll get many more hits than you would otherwise. If you are already in Yahoo, don't despair; my initial listing in Yahoo was awful, but I managed to double the number of clickthroughs I get from them by successfully requesting a change to my listing. You can learn how to make these all-important submissions by reading
How to get listed in Yahoo (and the other major indexes).
Writing the site description you submit to Yahoo is the single most important step you will ever take during site promotion, so spending some extra time on this step is highly recommended. If you follow my advice, and your site is decent, you'll almost always get in without any problems. I get emails all the time saying things like
"I've been trying to get into Yahoo for 6 months, but after following your instructions, I got listed in less than a week." It's great ego massage, so I want to get one from you too!
Submit to the general indexes. There are many "2nd-tier" indexes that are worth submitting to, though not worth crafting a specially optimized listing for (although the advice in the previous step is still valid). I've broken these down into a variety of categories (including general indexes, british and canadian-specific indexes and search engines, international indexes, indexes that accept adult sites, and special-purpose indexes) so that you can submit to them in small chunks as time permits. SelfPromotion.com can autosubmit to over 50 of these, and provides manual links to several hundred more (mostly the special-purpose and international/foreign- language ones). Once you've read the
search engine submission tool tutorial you'll understand how to do this. You can also look at the
list of search engines if you so desire.
The effects of the dot-com crash are quite interesting. Since the spring of 2000, about 40 2nd-tier indexes and searchengines (and several of the big guys) that I used to auto-submit to have curled up and died. But there's still plenty to submit to.
Send me money! This is the step my wife likes the best. SelfPromotion.com works like shareware. If you like what the site does, you can contribute what
you think it's worth. That's right, you set the price. It took me about a year to realize that I had reinvented the concept of
tipping.
If you contribute, then I keep your data around for a year (making future promotions easier, since most of the typing gets done for you) and you also get access to a bunch of cool tools (see below for more details), as well as the ability to apply for awards.
If you don't contribute, then after 4 weeks, your account gets deleted to make room for the next person.
Consider paying for hits. The good news about listing in the search engines and indexes is that it's free. The bad news is that you don't have much control. While it is certainly worthwhile to tweak your pages in search of high rankings, it's not always possible to get the ones you want. There are, however, several places that can provide you with well-targeted traffic for pennies a visitor. My favorite is
Overture.com and I have a page dedicated to
using pay-per-click cost-effectively.
Learn more about sales and promotion. In the almost three years I've been running this site, I've written a number of articles that you may find of interest. You'll find the links on the right-hand side of the page under Tutorials and Articles. I've also found some good
Web Marketing Courses that will help you plan how to handle the traffic you get. After all, if you're selling on the web, it's not how many hits you get, it's how many sales you make. If your wonderful widget website doesn't do a good job of selling widgets, then all the search engine traffic in the world isn't going to do you much good -- and it's much easier to double your site's effectiveness than it is to double its traffic (even better, of course, is to do both!). Next, since knowing who is visiting your site and how they got there is very useful, you should consider tracking your visitors. If you have access to your webserver logs, consider using the free
Analog web-analysis software (available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and more). If not, consider a web-based service like
Web-Stat. Finally, I have a well-stocked
Links of Interest page that contains listings of other great promotion and webmaster resource sites.
Do your research before hiring anyone to do promotion for you. While my site is aimed at do-it-yourselfers, some people may be more comfortable hiring a consultant to do site tweaking and search engine registration. Even so, it's important to understand the basics before doing so; there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen out there, and a little knowledge is an effective "bull$h1t detector". For example, if someone promises to put you on page 1 of the search engines, run away as fast as you can! Getting on page 1 for
relevant keywords takes hard work and patience, and is not something that any reputable consultant will ever promise (a common scam is promising you page 1 results and delivering them -- for irrelevant or hyper-specific phrases that will never generate any meaningful traffic).
It's important to understand what you're buying, so take your time, read around the site, and get an education before you hire someone (and before you ask, I don't do this kind of consulting, I simply don't have the time!)
Read the rest of this page! Assuming I haven't completely turned your brain to mush with all of the above verbiage, read on. The rest of this page explains in more detail what the site does, and how it does it.
