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by Traffic Building Faculty
“Unless your subject matter is somewhat unique, or you have hours of free time to optimize each of your pages, you shouldn’t worry too much about search engines.”
Yes, it cannot hurt to take the time to submit to them, but you probably won’t get much in the way of traffic. You’re going to have to rely on other methods to bring in droves of visitors. Before you worry about any form of promotion, simply visit EACH your pages three times a week. In addition to fueling your machine, this helps by making sure your pages and links are all functioning.
The best way to get people to visit is to simply tell them, and e-mail is a very direct way to do so. We always search for mailing lists that relate to the subject matter of our site, and we keep this list up-to-date with direct links to the submission forms (if they have them). If your word processor supports web links, we suggest you keep all of your promotional links in a single organized document. This way when you begin a campaign, you can simple work down your list.
STOP! Sending e-mail is easy. Sending SPAM is even easier. We all get them – annoying e-mail messages promising the world. Most of us also delete them without reading anything other than the subject line. Make sure you pick opt-in lists and send out messages carefully.
We like to plan out what and when we send out information to drive traffic to our site. Going back into our word processor, we copy our chunked content and for each page we develop a short summary. We prepend to this an introduction about the overall site and add some text to the end encouraging a quick visit (always make your site sound EASY to use).
Since we try to prepare ten pages of content for our site, we should end up with ten e-mail campaigns in the queue. We number each campaign and then take out our calendar and schedule when to distribute them. Think about your target audience when scheduling. Are they business people who surf during the week? Are they retired people who surf during the afternoon? Are they college students who surf late at night? Pick days and times when you think they’ll most likely be online.
Our ten campaigns, repeated five times, last us a whole year. Each year we prepare a new batch, always improving upon the copy. Also, each time we send out e-mail, we alter the subject matter (and the first sentence) so repeat readers don’t pass over it and administrators don’t consider it SPAM.
Below are some good sources for mailing lists – we like ones that let you submit via e-mail rather than by online form. After you have had a chance to register for these programs, come back and continue on to the next lesson. Be sure to bookmark this page so you don’t lose your place.
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