Oh boy … this is the new dilemma of too many online marketers today. They want their website to sell for them but, there are 101 website promotion strategies to consider and everyone has the “best suggestion” that will send them a flood of traffic to their site.

There is one problem though …

You can’t utilize all 101 ways … if you try, you’re going to crash and burn and your site won’t do any selling for you.

Bear with me, I’m going to rant, but I’m also going to give you some sweet tips so you get more traffic to your site! Fair? Okay, read on with your eyes WIDE open!

If you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time, you’ll remember the “blogging and pinging,” the “tagging and pinging,” “trackbacks,” “pingpacks,” etc for getting traffic to your blog. Whilst these strategies are not obselete, you could literally add 101 new ways to market and promote your blog or website nowadays and by marketing and promoting, I mean getting noticed so you get lots of “targeted” traffic to your site.

But, here’s problem number 2 …

Blog Promotion And Website Promotion Strategies Seems To Have Been Lost In All The Noise Of Social Media, Video Blogging, Podcasting, More Sophisticated Blog Designs Etc, and New Bloggers In Particular Fail To Give Their Site A Solid Foundation

Now, I am not saying that these methods should be ignored but if as a business owner you are going to build authority with your site, if you want to be known as the expert in your field, and if you want to attract new business and sell more products and services, you are going to have to get one thing right …

… You are going to have to learn “how” to produce good quality content!

You are also going to have to know the best practices of sharing your content on the social media sites listed above rather than just being a casual visitor and, your site should become the hub that people can visit after they’ve seen your content on the various content sharing sites.

Whilst I appreciate that us mentors have been promoting the “sack your designer” thing, there is a fine line between knowing all that there is to know about website building and making your site sell for you!

Creating Content should be your number one priority

It’s about going back to the principles outlined in Timothy Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week’ … You have to strengthen your strengths and where at all possible, outsource the rest.  Therefore, if you’re great at creating content but not so great on distributing or promoting that content, outsource it.

I learnt how to build WordPress blogs out of pure frustration with the rubbish I was being presented in terms of what many designers considered a marketing website.  Now I am able to make money building blogs and consult with entrepreneurs, independent professionals and small business owners, for the most part, there are tell-tale signs as to who will create a successful business online and who will struggle to get any recognition.

The success stories come from those like Gavin Ingham who is willing to focus on content marketing and those who struggle tend to focus too much on website design … and not just any old website design, the worst one …

DIY web design!

In other words, they want to be able to do it all themselves no matter how in depth the coding and whether they even know anything about HTML or PHP.

Yes, your site design is important, but if you don’t publish good quality content on your site, no matter how pretty it is, no matter how much time you spend sprucing it up, no one will even know your site exists.

Basically, you gotta walk before you can run and many of the things that bloggers and content marketers think they “need” right now, will do nothing to help them attract traffic even if they spent thousands of dollars per month on pay-per-click advertising.

Let’s face it, what are people going to see when they visit your site …

“Welcome to my new site?”

I personally didn’t even try to monetize my blog until I was blogging for months but that was out of personal choice but you can’t have five articles on your site and expect to attract ten new clients or, make a shed load of money with AdSense or from affiliate marketing or sell your products and services.  You do however need to give people good solid content to encourage trust from your readers before they will even consider buying from you or, hiring your services.

Anyway, less of my rant, here are my Top Ten Tips for getting more traffic to your site “quick time.” And, I’m not even going to mention that you should not be spending hours designing when you should be promoting …

In terms of ease, here they are:

Tip #1: If you are using WordPress, ensure your ping services are set up correctly and up to date BEFORE you even write your first blog post and, ensure your very first article or blog post says more than “welcome.” Give the spiders enough “flies” to get their attention and your human visitors a reason to want to return even if your site only has one article on it.

You will find the list of ping services in WordPress 3.3 by going to “settings” and then “writing.”  If pinging is a new term to you but you want to understand more about how it works, see this great article about pinging to get top search engine rankings.

Tip #2: Set up your permalinks so the search engine spiders recognise you. The default permalink set by WordPress (http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123) will do very little for your search engine ranking if anything at all. The search engines don’t understand what “?p=123″ means and is useless for enabling anyone to find your keyword loaded blog posts.

I personally use the custom permalink structure /%postname%/ although I have seen very successful bloggers such as Pro Blogger using the date and name based structure.

Tip #3: Write keyword specific articles. I know this might sound obvious but it’s amazing how many times I harp on about this and then I visit people’s sites and it has no structure, no keywords and then they ask why their site isn’t being indexed by the search engines.

This is where I could go off on the deep end again about ignoring basic search engine optimization techniques in favor of social marketing, podcasting, video marketing etc. Whichever method you use, you’re going to have to learn some basic SEO and apply it to your articles as well as the content you distribute via custom media sites such as video sharing sites … period!

In particular, you want the keyword in the title of your article, preferably in the first sentence and throughout the article without making it look like spam – i.e. you don’t want to write your keyword every other sentence. You want the keywords to appear as natural as possible and, if you can anchor text a couple of your keywords, all the better.

If it would appear unnatural to your readers by having the keywords in the title and first line of your articles, use the All In One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. Just type that into Google and you’ll find it.

Tip #4: Give People the option to be updated via RSS. RSS in my view has been neglected somewhat and yet, it’s a great way to spread the word about your new content. If you’re using WordPress to promote your content, your RSS feed is created automatically which will allow RSS publishers to syndicate or distribute your content.

RSS makes your content easy to find by the search engines which means that it will be easier for them to index therefore easier for your content pages to get ranked.

However, because RSS feeds are automatically created on most blog platforms, it can be ignored as a powerful means to get your message out to your target market. So, ensure you have a link for people to sign up to your RSS feed on every page of your site, pereferably with an icon to draw people’s eyes to it so they can sign up to receive automatic updates.

The best places to put your RSS link is in the header, sidebar or under the header … basically where it will be automatically displayed on every page.

Tip #5: Submit your blog to blog directories. Blog directories are orgainzed into categories and are much like web directories or ezine directories where you can go to find sites that relate to your particular interest. Signing up to them is usually quick (less than 5 minutes) and more importantly it’s free to list with most directories.

Listing your blog in blog directories will also help your site get higher rankings with the search engines, because your blog link will be added to more websites which will result in more sites linking back to yours.

For the top 55 RSS and feed directories, check out Robin Good’s site at http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip #6: Comment on other people’s blogs. If you use something like Comment Kahuna, this makes it easier for you to find blogs that you can comment on as well as find blogs that don’t utilize the “no follow” tag.  This will enable you to build some quality backlinks to your blog.

If you leave a comment, make it worthwhile. Always ask yourself “how” you want people to react when they read your comment.

This should be a lesson to those who rant on other people’s blogs without providing any substance to their rant and certainly without offering an alternative. Other readers will just think you’re full of sour grapes and won’t want to come near your blog even if you have the best product or service on the market.

Tip #7: Provide good quality product testimonials. If you’ve recently purchased a product and you have a genuine testimonial to give, send it to the product owner because you never know where your testimonial might end up.

I admit, this wasn’t a deliberate strategy to get incoming links to my site, but I know that some of my comments have ended up on good authority sites and, one occasion one of my readers told me that he had found the link to my site from a testimonail that I had written about a new membership site software that was being promoted. I didn’t even know the testimonial was on the site.

If you do give testimonials, ensure they say more than “great product.” Tell the owner of the product how it has saved you time, money, effort or how and why this is the solution you’d been waiting for.

It does go without saying that your testimonials should be genuine and not fabricated. You could get people emailing you for an update on how you’re getting on with the product and your integrity is in knowing that you can provide honest feedback even if you are no longer using the product for good reasons.

Tip #8: Add an opt-in box to your blog. This is very similar to tip number 4 but you want to be able to capture names and addresses of your visitors so that you can keep them updated with great information, new products etc.  Avoid pitching in every email you send and remember that email marketing is content marketing.  Email is just another means of publishing your content.

My personal recommendation for email broadcasts and database management is Aweber although I know some Internet Marketers are combining thier RSS subscriptions with their database subscriptions via Feedblitz which is Feedburner’s email newsletter management system.

Tip #9: Subscribe to Social Bookmarking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.

Joining and participating in (the operative word being participate) in social networking is certainly a way of networking to build relationship as well as getting some free traffic and backlinks to your blog. One word of caution with social networking sites is that it can become a full time job making them work for you if you don’t focus on what is important … content distribution and relationship building.

My suggestion is that you sign up to one or two social media sites, get some results and then sign up to another two until you’re familiar with them. You have to decide whether you will go wide or deep and it’s my view that spreading yourself too thinly across all the social networking platforms won’t get you nearly as much benefit as really working a few.

Tip #10: Add podcasts and videos. Like social networking, podcasts and video blogging will get you free traffic and some bonus backlinks. If you feel this is a techie’s strategy for promoting your blog content, let me clear that myth up …

“It has never been easier to add audio and video to your blogs.”

The quickest and easiest way to get started is to open an account with Audio Acrobat. You can record both video and audio there and then add the recordings along with the players to your blog. They also provide free training on a regular basis so you don’t have to feel as though you’re tackling this method of blog content creation in isolation.

In conclusion … I hope you’ve gained some insight from this post about how to promote your site’s content and just by being diligent in implementing the first five strategies will keep the traffic coming on a consistent basis but more importantly, these strategies will make your content sell.

To Your Online Business Success!