Promoting Your Web Page

Once you have your Web Page up and running the next thing you need to do is to let everyone know about your new presence on the Internet. This can be a BIG and Expensive undertaking. There are some free services if you have the time and patience to do it all yourself.

One way of promoting your site is with one or more of the Banner Exchange programs where you can have a banner that advertises your web page displayed on other pages and you display other banners. This is a good way to get known and is a trade type of program. So far I have found three such programs listed below. *Georewards is a banner swapping program that is only available to individuals that have a home page at Geocities.

Georewards*

Internet
Link Exchange

Bannerswap

The use of Gif Wizard is a great tool when submitting Banners to the different exchange programs. Banners need to be of a certain size and I have found that making a good banner within the limits is difficult to say the least, Gif Wizard will shrink your gif banner to the accepted limit.

Shrink your GIF file size up to 90% with GIF Wizard:

For GIFs stored on an Internet WWW server, enter the URL of the GIF. Make sure you enter the URL of the specific GIF, not the page it is on!
Example:"http://geocities.datacellar.net/SiliconValley/Pines/1859/big_gif.gif".
Then click on the "Gif Wizard" button.

The problem I find with the Banner Exchange programs is that your banner is one of many and is displayed one moment and gone the next. I have found myself seeing a banner that I would be interested in visiting but can't find it now, I keep looking for it, just in case it pops up again. One option to this is to look for places that directly swap banners (there banner stays permanently and yours stays permanently on theirs).

Website Promotion Page is one that is just a plan swap of banners. If you go to their page you will see my banner there too. It is limited exposure, as I alway wonder who would go to visit a page full of banners. However, I have found myself doing exactly that. I find that surfing the net the banner pages are excellent sources of finding out what is out there. Another straight banner swap site is:

Banner Link Exchange

Banner Link Exchange is a single person who has set up a banner page and offers to display your banner in exchange for displaying his. There are even individuals that will offer to make you a banner for your page for FREE. If you have someone make you a banner don't be surprised if it take a while to get done. I found that the individuals where overloaded with requests and it can take weeks. I asked three different individuals to make me a banner. The first two I still haven't heard back from and the last one I asked was Eric Roseberry at "http://geocities.datacellar.net/Tokyo/1292/" (as you can see Eric is a Geocities neighbor) and I think he does a great banner. One thing I like about Eric's approach is that he visits your site and takes images and things directly from your site to incorporate into your banner. This is the banner Eric did for me:

I like it, and Eric had it done within a week and for free. If you don't know who to go to for a banner try Eric out, I am sure he would be glade to do one for you.

The problem with banners is that it is easy to get carried away with them. Some people totally depend on banners to bring people to their site and some get upset if they are not getting what is referred to as "click through" rates that are high. Internet Link Exchange statistics of click through rates is 33:1, which means your banner has to display 33 times before you can expect someone to click on your banner and visits your site. To have your banner displayed 33 times you need to have 66 visitors visit your site. How this works is that the banner from ILE (Internet Link Exchange) registars a hit every time someone visits your page where a ILE banner is posted. Every 2 visits that the banner records your banner is displayed on another site. This same procedure is also used with Bannerswap and Georewards. The 33:1 is the rate if you have a good banner, most of us can expect less click through rate then that too. So with this calculated into the figures it is best not to leave all of your site promotion to banners. I figure if you get 1 to 2 percent click through you are doing fairly good ( that is 1 or 2 per 100 displays). This is why I have all three banner programs on my pages, I will get 100 displays combined with ILE, Bannerswap, and Georewards faster than if I was only participating in one of them.

Other things to do to promote your site is the free services from some of the commercial promotion companies. All of the ones I have visited offer a certain amount of fee service in promoting your site. Most of all of these require that you do the work, they provide the forms and the sites to send your site information to. Postmaster offers to list your site at 24 search and directory listings plus to send your site information out in their daily email listing of new sites. This email posting is to individuals that have been asked to receive this email listing and there are thousands that receive it daily. On the day Postmaster sent my information out I had over 40 visitors that day. It paid off and specially since it was FREE. The other services are also very good and offer similar services. The companies listed below are worth checking out and using their FREE services is worth while. They also have a very good promotional pay service, they will do all the submitting for you, for a price. Another good service that I want to mention is Submit. Submit is also worth spending some time and go through their services:




Pointers to Pointers is a well organized and affordable professional service for submitting your URL to the major search engines and directories. They also offer a Free trial where you can submit your URL to 5 search engines and directories. Only $10 for submitting to 50 sites. I recommend it highly.

The last thing I do is to submit my URL address everywhere I can, when I am surfing the net. That is how I found these two useful sites:

Also every Hot Spot that I run into I look for a submit link as all of these places have a place to send your URL address to, in order to be considered as a Hot Spot site. It has nothing to do with the idea that I think my site is "Hot" it is just that I want them to look at it and let me know what they think of it. I want them to know I am out there. I have so far been added to two Hot Spots, to my pleasant surprise. Another site I look to is online magazines, they always have either What's New sections or Hot Spot lists.

You can spend all of your online time just promoting your site, like me, so be careful that you don't spend to much of your time doing this. I would suggest a mixture of the above promoting activities, depending on the time you have and how much you want to build up traffic to your site.
As I find more promoting resources I will keep this page updated with what I find. I would also like to hear from you as to any ideas you may have. I may want to included them here as well. Let me know by either email or leave a note in my guestbook.

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Changes last made on: 03/11/97