Online Manual - Promote Your Site
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Promoting Your Site

As I've said before, when you plan out the design of your home page, you need to be planning your marketing strategy concurrently. Your home pages are going to be written in such a way that they attract the most visitors.

There are two distinct ways in which people find information for the first time on the Internet. The first method is what I term the "active method" This is where the user is actively searching for information through key word searches, or looking your site up in a directory.

The second way people find information on the Internet is through what I term "passive methods" This involves a person getting to your site while not actively searching for it. Usually, this is accomplished by clicking on a link to your page from some other unrelated site. It can also involve someone searching for one particular subject, seeing a description of something else, and deciding to take a look at it on a whim.

Normally, people using the active method would be the ones you would want to get to your site first, and then those that use the passive method second. But the Internet is just not like that. The webbed nature of the Internet, and the browsing nature of the software and users, tend to make both methods equal. Just look at what they call the software used to traverse the Internet. They are called "Browsers", not "Searchers".

There are also two different types of marketing. One I term "target marketing" where you are marketing to your target audience. In this method, you are going to actively promote your site where you know it will attract the target group. The greatest percentage of your sales, as compared to group population, should come from your target audience.

The second method of marketing is what I term "broad base" marketing. This is where you will be marketing your page to everyone in the Internet community, and not specifically to your target audience. Some sites will be visited my specific groups of people, while other sites can not be categorized as hosting specific groups. Sites that tend to be visited by all types of people and large numbers of people are search engines, weather and news sites, and other general information sites. Placing a billboard ad at the InfoSeek search engine site would be a form of "broad base marketing".
There are several ways in which to promote your Web pages. Some that we will explore are:

Search Engines
Advertising (Billboard ads)
Name Recognition (URL address)
Links
News Groups and Mailing Lists
Traditional Advertising


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