So you have a website, but are you getting any traffic? If you
think that just having a website published on the internet is
enough for customers to find you, you may be in for a nasty
shock! Unless you have an extremely niche product or service,
you are competing against millions of websites offering the same
thing. There are several ways to promote your website in order
to get traffic and subsequently sell your products or services:

1. Optimise your website so that it gets found in the natural
search engine results. Most potential customers don’t get
further than the first page of results, so that is what you are
aiming for.

2. Consider paying for adverts on Google and/or Yahoo. Do
monitor your results to see if the adverts are cost effective.
You don’t want to be paying more for adverts than you receive in
sales. You can add a tracking code to your advert to monitor
traffic coming from different adverts.

3. Get listed on relevant directories. There are many shopping
directories on the internet which offer free listings. Most of
these require a reciprocal link from your website.

4. Contact websites offering similar products or services and
exchange links. Many websites have a Links page, with a form to
automatically submit your link. You will probably need to add
their link to your website before they will approve your link.
Some websites will only accept links with websites who have
achieved a certain Google Page Rank. Read any terms and
conditions before you waste time submitting a link request which
may be rejected.

5. Write articles and submit them to websites which specialise
in publishing articles, with a link to your website in the
author bio. This will get you a one-way link back to your
website, which is considered to be more beneficial than
exchanging links. You may find that other websites copy your
article with the author bio, so you can get several one-way
links from one article, but this can be temporary as many
websites change their pages regularly to show new articles.

6. If you have a profile on Yahoo or MSN for their
email/messenger services, you can add a website link to that and
create a back link that way.

7. Consider paying to advertise your products/services in
newspapers and magazines, with a link to your website. If it is
a new business or product, you may get some free editorial space
with a website link.

8. Create a blog and add to it regularly.

9. If you use a product or service on another website, and they
publish customer reviews with website links, then go ahead and
submit your own review.

10. Get business cards printed with your website address on, and
hand them out whenever you get the chance!

If you have a new website, it will take time to build links and
get listed on the various search engines. Optimising your
website can be a slow process, but it is rewarding to see a
steady increase in visitors, and watching your keyword search
results getting higher up in the natural results on the major
search engines. It won’t happen overnight, but there is no
reason why you can’t achieve first page results.

source