Building Traffic: Identify your audience!

Once your site has been completed, you will want others to see it. Site promotion is the science of bringing the right readers to your site. The first law of site promotion is this one:

Not all traffic is good.

How can this be? Surely the best strategy for promoting your site would be to expose it to everybody, right? Wrong. If you want your site to succeed, you should choose a focus,determine the type of person who would want to see that kind of site, and then market as effectively as possible to those people. If you are spending money or effort to promote your site, make sure it's not wasted on people who just don't care about your site and aren't interested in it's topic.

If you are unlucky enough to bring in the wrong kind of traffic, they will leave. Quickly. Which brings us to the second law of website promotion:

Readers will keep leaving sites until they find what they want (not what you want them to find!)

Get your pad and paper out, because you'll have to start making some lists. The first thing you should do is to decide what words or phrases describe your site and it's content. Write them down.

Here's an example: If your site sells outboard motors, then your list might include "outboard motors", "boat motors", "outboard motor sales", "yamaha outboard motors", "evinrude outboard motors", etc. These are the phrases that you should use to point potential buyers to your site. Next, you should check out your competition. Long before your site goes live, there are people looking to buy outboard motors on the net. Try to figure out where they end up. You should start with Search Engines and Indexes. Using the list of phrases that you've created, enter them in the search engines, and see who comes up. Those people are beating you at the marketing game.

Your goal: When someone wants what your site offers, they should find your site first!

Learn about the easiest ways to connect with your audience: Search Engines and Indexes

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