Web Promotion Strategies

Crunching The Numbers

In the space of a year, I took my website from invisibility to a respectable amount of traffic - more than 10,000 page views. People started finding my site and offering me jobs. The trouble is, I tried so many things that I'm not sure which one worked. Here's what I did. Maybe some of it will work for you too.

1. Choose A Domain Name

I bought my domain name almost a year before I was ready to do anything with it. That was one area where I made a mistake, going for a name that captured what I thought I wanted to do. Doublehdesign is ok, but SharonHurleyHall.com would have been better. I've bought the other one now, but I've put a lot of effort into promoting doublehdesign, so I'll have to be creative in how I promote the other one. If you are blogging, choose the name of your blog carefully. Although you may be able to change it later, any links that you have promoted may show up as broken if you change the name (this happens on WritingUp). This will not help with site traffic.

2. Create A Website

I set up my site. This was quite simple when it started. There was a home page, a bio/cv/resume page, a ghostwriting page, a writing samples page and a contact form. This was enough to get me going. It was simple and I added the bells and whistles such as my photo, links pages, a sitemap and google ads later. I added one page a week to my site for about four months. I updated at least one page every week or two. If you're blogging, add at least a couple of posts a week.

3. Promotion By Adding A Blog

I added a blog in November. This was a good move, because that's when my traffic really started to increase. However, a month later, I got addicted to blogging at a new site, so it might have been just as easy to use that feed on my site, with links back to the site whenever possible. This is a strategy several bloggers use effectively.

4. Submit To Google, Yahoo, MSN

I submitted my site and blogs to Google, Yahoo and MSN. I also submitted my site to DMOZ, where it's been listed at last after nearly a year. Then I submitted to other appropriate directories. The difficulty with this is that there was rarely a category that matches exactly what your site or blog is about. Some directories listed writers' sites as personal, others as business, still others as arts. I just picked a category and hoped for the best. This added to my search engine hits and to my traffic. I submitted my blog to blog directories of all sorts. First of all I went for those that did not require a linkback, then I targeted a few that did. Traffic to my blog soon surpassed traffic to the main site. A word of warning, though. Sometimes you can get submit-happy and submit to sites that will bring traffic that you don't want. I don't think it's a coincidence that a month after doing an accidental mass submit to sites around the world, I got traffic from sites looking to sell Viagra, Tramadol and more.

5. Promotion By Writing For Free

One of my best promotion techniques was writing for free. I wrote free articles for EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticleMarketer.com, ArticleBlast.com, SubmitYourNewContent.com and many others. These are the ones that have resulted in the most links back to my site. EzineArticles is the one that had the quickest results. Two of my articles got picked up by freelancewriting.com and I consistently get 10 or more hits a month from this site. I also wrote reviews on Dooyoo.co.uk, ciao.co.uk and Epinions.com. This allowed me to practice writing, earn some pennies, show some versatility and develop my writing voice. Again, many of these turn up all over the web.

6. Finding Opportunities Through Blogging

I signed up with freelance job agencies, looked on craigslist and looked at other job listings. These brought some work, but blogging has been even more fruitful. It was on a blog site that I first heard about InspiredAuthor, Blogitive, Lifetips, IFreelance and other sites which are now the backbone of my freelance writing life. Taking time to read other blogs paid off in a way I could not have predicted.

7. Promotion Through Keywords, Tagging And Pinging

I'm also trying a new strategy. I look to see what people have been searching for (or in the case of my blog, which ads appear on the days I make most money) and then I blog about that topic again. It's too early to say how that will turn out. I do use keywords in my blog posts, though. If you want your blog to be known for a particular subject, research the keywords, use them in your blog, and use them as tags. If you look through my blogs, you'll find that tags on the early posts are all over the place, while tags on recent posts are much more focused.

8. Promotion: Keep Updating

Believe it or not, when I started my promotion efforts, I didn't know much about what I was doing. I read, learned and tried new ideas, discarding the ones that didn't seem to work for me. Now that I know more about what I'm doing, it's time to look at my site and blog again and see how they could be improved. Some of the pages need some work on keywords; others need to be split into two. Of course, I'm so busy writing now that I have less time to spend on promotion, but I know I've got to keep up my website promotion efforts to keep the ball rolling. I hope some of these strategies work for you.

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Some Of My Stuff

Sharon Hurley Hall (web site)

Freelance Inspiration (lens)

Site on Steroids (lens)

Write Niche (blog)

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Read My Other Hubs: Four Secrets Of Freelance Writing

Read My Other Hubs: How Blogging Helps Writers

RSS for comments on this Hub

Iðunn says:
3 years ago

useful info

Mitchell Allen says:
3 years ago

Sharon,

Wow! This is great info. I've done 10% of this (blogging and Free articles). I understand you're becoming an expert at social networking. Sounds like another hub, to me :)

Thanks for sharing!

Mitch

rappinhood says:
3 years ago

Hey, Mitch. Thanks for stopping by. These strategies have really worked - and I'll seriously consider a hub on social networking - when are we going to see networking tips on one of your hubs? :)

vic602 says:
3 years ago

Really like your work. Some good ideas. I'm new to the Hub community, but not new to freelance writing. It's nice to meet another freelancer. Sometime, if you have the time, check out my Irreverent Guide series of hubs and let me know what you think. I'd really appreciate that.

I look forward to reading more of youir posts.

Vic

rappinhood says:
3 years ago

Thanks, Vic. I will.

gracepub says:
18 months ago

Hello, I made another hubb today for wealthy-writer. I finished and thought I'd pop over and see what great info you had today.

dritts says:
8 months ago

Hello, thank you for the information. I hope I can use these tips to promote my other website

MagicStarER says:
6 months ago

These are great tips and you turned me on to a few places I didn't know about. Keywords are a very important part of increasing your search engine ranking, both the judicious choice of keywords, and the strategic use of them in your articles.

A question: Do you get any benefit other than linking from these places? EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticleMarketer.com, ArticleBlast.com, SubmitYourNewContent.com ??

rappinhood says:
6 months ago

Yes, I definitely get a benefit in terms of profile raising too. As a writer, using those sites gives me the chance to write about some new areas.