Website Promotion: The Bane of a Website Owners Existence

Website promotion is a must if you own a website. In this article, I will mostly be discussing my own personal experiences promoting a humor website operated by myself, The Gerk, and a few friends (Shameless plug notice: Check out ArabianMonkey.com : The Best Place To Monkey Around On The Net) If you are running a business website and selling a bunch of items then good luck. I have no idea how to help you.

Alright, so if you came here you want to know how to promote your Associated Content material or a website right? Here are a few things to remember when promoting (conveniently done in list form!):

1. What is your target audience? Do you own a sports website, a humor website, or a site with a little bit of everything? Figuring out your audience will be key in finding websites to promote to. For example, you don't want to be submitting your home improvement writing to SlackerNetwork.

2. Is my website designed so those who like your initial product can view more of your work and is it designed to please the eye? Basically, how interconnected and well linked is your website. It might sound stupid, but a lot of websites make it difficult to get to their own homepage from an article or video! Make everything on your site accessible. Perhaps you can put links to different areas of your website on the sidebar? Maybe have a section after your writing saying something along the lines of "Like this? Check out this, this, this, and this!" Remember, sometimes you only have a few seconds to impress a viewer. Say someone Stumbles upon your website. Chances are, if you have a poorly designed and inaccessible site, they will quickly hit that stumble upon button and bounce from your page.

3. Do you offer anything new to the given field? Let's say you have a website about cats. You love cats. You live, breathe, kick, and eat cats (relax, I'm kind of kidding). But do you offer anything new to the whole "I love cats" thing? Give your readers something to remember. Give them something fresh. Something like Top 5 Movie Cats of All Time. Will another "Reason's to love cats" or "How to groom you cats" really separate your page from others? Probably not.

4. Do you have pictures and one or two memorable snippets from your writing? You have a well designed site and you even have some excellent, fresh, well written material. Why aren't people going to your website? Well, your writing might not be suited for promotion yet! Remember what I said earlier. You only have a few seconds to impress a viewer. Remember that. Write it down somewhere. Tattoo it on your private parts. Whatever. The point is some websites allow you to submit a picture and then give you a FEW words to describe it. When promoting to a site such as Digg, you only have a clever picture and a few clever words to direct people to your site. Make them count! Stand out from the rest. Pretend you are the viewer. Why should I waste a whole 5 seconds of my life on your website?

5. If they like it, can they share it? Put something on your site so a viewer can bookmark what they like or email it to a friend. People aren't going to take the time to promote your stuff and share it with others unless they thing it is really good AND they have an easy means to do so. Put some Digg buttons or Reddit buttons on that site dawg!

Alright, I have compiled a list of a few sites to promote to. Some of these sites you can promote your content on there no matter your content. Social bookmarking sites for example. Others are unique to humor websites. Just check them out and see if they apply to you. Want to know how to find sites to promote to? Well, once I find a site that fits my promotion need, I usually type it into Google. From there, I click on the similar pages button below the search result. There, you will find similar sites to promote to and open your promotion possibilities up. If you find anymore or if you see a few I missed (I don't have time to list all of them, there are so many!) don't be afraid to put it in the comments section!

Great list of social bookmarking sites!

Some starter social bookmarking sites (StumbleUpon is s must!)
http://www.digg.com
Http://www.reddit.com
http://del.icio.us
http://www.stumbleupon.com

Others!
http://www.collegehumor.com
http://www.slashdot.com
http://www.jokeaday.com/7wildlinks.shtml
http://i-am-bored.com/
http://squizzle.com/linksubmit.asp
http://www.linklust.net/
http://www.uniquedaily.com/navigation_content.php#sl
http://www.dailyunique.com/addlink.aspx
http://www.linkfury.com/
http://www.zipped.org/submit.php
http://onehumor.com/
http://linkfilter.net/
http://www.boingboing.net/suggest.html
http://www.boredatwork.com/submit.cgi
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/elinks/

Oh...and don't forget about promoting to this one :)
ArabianMonkey.com Links