How Not to Promote Your Website

We write a lot about how you should promote your website. In the article, we thought we would change the tune a bit. Rather than telling you what to do, we focus on what you shouldn't be doing to promote your website. If you avoid doing the five things below, your chances of success will greatly increase. Enjoy.

• Submission services: Basically you can forget them. While there may be 100,000+ search engines on the Internet, spending your hard earned money on an automatic submission service to all of these is a waste of time and money. There are really only 30 or so search engines worth submitting too, the rest won't make a big difference on your organic traffic. Do a search on the top search engines by traffic and then submit manually to these. If you want to submit to more then check out selfpromotion.com and this will head you in the right direction.
• Don't send unsolicited email: Basically don't spam. While it may seem like you are reaching a large audience, most of them won't want to hear from you... period! Do things honestly and focus on the key niche your website is in. Don't confuse spam with email marketing or ezines etc. Ezines are a very powerful tool where you provide useful information to people in a particular niche. The big difference of course is that ezines are opt-in.
• Don't list with all directories: As mentioned in the first dot point, there are thousands of search engines online, but only a few are worth submitting too. The same goes for directories. Look for directories that are relevant to your particular niche and start manually submitting to these. People who are after information in your niche will be searching on these directories.
• Don't create backlinks with software: Again while it seems tempting to use software to create 1000s of backlinks, you could end up getting your site band by Google. Produce quality and relevant content, and use mechanisms such as article marketing to promote your site with backlinks. Remember it is not the number of backlinks, it is the quality of the links, and the diversity of the links that count.
• Don't forget about social media: You can quite actively promote your site via social media sites such as HubPages.com. If you write well written key word specific articles you stand to generate a heap of traffic.

The promotion of your website is quite easy if you stick to the basics and avoid new and popular products that offer unrealistic claims about web promotion. The fundamentals are quite simple. Develop up a site in a underrepresented niche, provide information that people need, sell a product that relates to the information, and then promote the website using legitimate means. The rest will take care of itself.

Rusty is an affiliate marketer with eight years experience. If you want to learn more affiliate marketing and web promotion tips then check out his free ezine at http://www.theaffiliatemarketingezine.com you will even receive a free affiliate marketing e-book valued at $39 just for checking it out!