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Internet Promotion & Traffic Acquisition

The internet in many ways is a chaotic realm of competition at all levels. On the large scale of things sites like Amazon and Barnes and Nobles battle it out for visitors and ultimately customers. On the low level fans of Lords of the Rings, Or Brittany Spears battle it out for the attention of websurfers so that their ideas and creations can be seen by those interested throughout the world. In between the extremes of merchants and one man fan operations there exists the search engines whose purpose is to help people find sites on topics that interest them; in theory profiting off of the advertising that can be shown to them along the way.

In the offline world one seldom sees one person operations advertising to spread their ideals to the world in any effective and strategic way. In the online world one sees lots of competition for keywords, for related links, email addresses for mailing lists and other means to obtain and lock in traffic for even one man operations. Even though the internet is based on a concept of competition it also exhibits a comraderie and exists as a series of alliances. Every link one site places to another site is an alliance of sorts. Link trading on the internet is a sort of low level business trade where power and influence rather than just potential earnings is the motivation.

In the offline world places and entities like shopping centers, phone books, libraries, and popular hangouts provide the means that people use to discover and share ideas. With limited choice and a difficulty in finding those with similiar interests the offline world exists as a series of hubs of congregation with limited choice. There is only one phone book in most towns that is used to find people and businesses to buy from. But online there are multiple resource sites; search engines whose whole purpose is to show one the millions of choices they can have for the things they wish to buy or learn about. Such is a distinction that those accostumed to offline lifestyles should become used to. The internet is a world of niche based experts rather than a world of reporters who quote those they believe to be niche based experts. With all of the billions of pages of content on the web, promotion is almost the most important thing that someone who wishes to have an online presence needs to focus on. Promotion online can occur via link building, search engines, paid advertising, and other strategies.

Link Building Strategies

Link building is the process of getting other webpages on the internet to add links to your site. This is done either by asking for links or waiting around for related sites that might find you and link on their own. Asking for links is far more effective but when asking for links its usually best to offer a link in return. Having a large number of popular sites link to your site will not only send traffic to your site from the other sites but it will also boost your rankings in many search engines that use link popularity or the quality of links to your site as part of their algorithms to determine which sites appear higher up in their results for a given keywod. *More

Directory Placement Stategies

On the internet at present there are 3 major human edited directories of the internet. These directories are browsed by people and used to provide searchable databases of high quality "select" sites that other search engines often rank higher because of their listings in a given directory. The three major directories in use today are Yahoo, ODP, and Looksmart. To be effective one needs to try to optimize for all of them.

Yahoo

ODP

Zeal/Looksmart

Other Directories

Search Engine Strategies

To be able to formulate a search engine strategy for promotion purposes one needs to first understand that there is a difference between search engines and directories. Directories are places where sites...Read More

Paid Online Advertising

Advertising online can be done via pay per click search engines, Pay for Inclusion for Search Engines, Pay for Directory submissions, Pay CPM or CPC prices for banners, skycrapers ... Read More

Banner Exchanges and Traffic Exchanges

Advertising can be done online via traffic exchange sites or banner exchange sites that show an ad for your site each time ever how many ads for the exchange are shown. Typically for every two ads you show your ad will be shown once. Exchange sites exist for popunders, banners, skyscrappers, buttons, and even text... Read More

Visitor Retention Strategies

Visitor retention strategies can include the use of message boards, free email, email newsletters, quizes, prizes... Read More

Offline Promotion Strategies

Offline promotion methods can include the use of bumper stickers, T-shirts, print advertising, TV and radio advertising and ... Read More