Five Time Tested & Proven Ways To Promote Your Web Site Author: Lawrence Deon Five Time Tested & Proven Ways To Promote Your Web Site One of the biggest hurdles online marketers face is web site promotion. There are literally countless ways to promote online; some are good while others are a complete waste of time. What works? Well there are several good strategies to get your message out to your niche. Each strategy will produce different results for various niches. Contests or Sweepstakes Holding a contest or sweepstakes is a proven way to promote your web site. You can announce your site to hundreds of web sites that list free contests and sweepstakes. Press Releases One of the most powerful promotion strategies is sending out press releases about your contest or sweepstakes. Ask entrants to your contest or sweepstakes if they would accept offers from your business in the future by e-mail. Chat Rooms or Forums Use online chat rooms to promote your web site. Find the right chat room where your targeted audience or niche would gather. Announce to everyone in the chat room something interesting or free that's offered on your web site to attract visitors. Always be aware of chat room rules before engaging the visitors in a sales pitch that could be considered spam. Cross promotional enterprising Cross promote or joint venture your web site with other sites. I try to find other web sites that have the same target audience, but are not in direct competition with my business. It’s a sure fire method of increasing my exposure to qualified prospects. Cross promotional enterprising with other businesses will increases your online exposure, sales, and helps beat your competition to the top of the search engine results pages. It doesn’t matter what your promoting you’ll find businesses to cross promote and joint venture with all over the Internet. Traffic Generators You can easily promote your web site by using traffic generators. I’m not talking about magic bullets or hocus pocus schemes either. They could be free e-zines, a service, e-book or contest etc. Giving away traffic generators gives you the opportunity to get free advertising by including your ad on them. Take it one step further and make it viral. Write a short ebook and give away the distribution rights. Other webmasters are generally receptive to promote quality content! . I sweetened the deal for my subscribers by adding a viral ebook, PPC Cash Bonanza and an issue-by-issue contest for free advertising in my newsletter, the Ranking Report. There are literally hundreds of online directories that will also let you submit your freebie information. Remember; let other people give away your traffic generators. Email Discussion Groups Posting messages to e-mail discussion lists is another great way to promote your web site. An e-mail discussion list is a group of people connected together via e-mail that can communicate with one another. When you post a message to a list always make sure you include your signature file at the end. Include an attention getting sentence why they should visit your web site. Just like a headline. Make it provocative and compelling! There are many more ways to promote your website. If one of these methods doesn’t work for you find another, but whatever you do… do something. Once you've committed to taking action everything you do online from sending emails to blogging or even just surfing the web, should be motivated towards producing more visitors to your web site and referring prospects through promotional means. Do nothing… get nothing, do a little & get a lot! About the Author Lawrence Deon is an SEO/SEM Consultant and author of the popular search engine optimization and marketing model Ranking Your Way To The Bank. http://www.rankingyourwaytothebank.com