From the beginning, we assume several things. First, that the site is of interest to a specific group, and second, that the economic resources are scarce enough to contract a banner campaign (small or large) or television advertising.
Based on these assumptions, what can we do to achieve the expected goals, how can we make our site known and tell the world that we are there?
There are two clear places where it is necessary to promote and make known the existence of this new site, one is inside the Internet and another is outside the Internet.
Promotion inside the Internet is something essential and relatively easy if there are resources for it, but what if there are not? Then it is necessary to act with a high degree of creativity and practicality.
The first step in the Internet is registration in search engines, according to the latest studies about 70% of information searches are made using search engines. Of course, appearing among the results of a specific search only means having a chance to be visited. The rest, the sale, the subscription, the request for information…, depends on the interest aroused in the visitor of the site.
The next step is to subscribe to various mailing lists or forums that are directly related to the subject of the site. The continuous participation in these lists is something really interesting, which makes the presence of the site known in a “sweet” way and encourages the visits of the really interested user. There are lists that allow sponsorship, which of course implies a certain cost. It’s up to you.
Next comes the best part. Using the media for your own benefit. I mean, what does a media feed on, news, articles, etc.? Well, you know, choose the media that you consider of your interest, write an article about your site and send it to them asking them to publish it. White advertising is one of the best promotion systems and on the Internet, where the user is the one who decides one hundred percent, even more.
If you have some extra money, you can also hire the sending of press releases, but be careful. Think about your objectives and analyze what you will get by paying a business journalist of an Australian newspaper to receive a message about a new site dedicated to trout fishing.
You can also study the exchange of banners with other sites. It is a very economical system and as effective as any banner system purchased from a search engine. Even more so if we make agreements with sites whose visitor profile is very similar or equal to the one we have defined for our own site, web about nature <=> web about rural tourism. In this way it is achieved that each impact of the banner, besides being really effective, has a really high click probability associated with it.
Now we will talk about what to do to promote the new site outside the net. Of course, we will continue to work on the initial assumptions: scarce economic resources.
Do you have cards, letterhead, catalogs? Then you should use them as soon as possible and think about creating new material. And on “all” this new material put your new web address, write it clearly, give it the same importance as the telephone number or even more.
Usually it is difficult to find the web address, but it is easy to read the phone number, do you want to receive calls asking for the web address? By the way, if you want to increase the recall of your website, you need to rent your own domain (.com .es .net …) that is related to the subject of the website or your company and that is easy to read, write and dictate …
Here are also applicable some of the promotion systems that seem to exist only on the Internet, guess which ones?