One of our students asked me the following question:
My biggest question is how do I promote a site from scratch? I mean I don’t know how to make a link or exchange a link, or anything like that. My other question is how do I link or put a link on another website?
Here is my answer:
There are many ways to do that, and I am currently writing a book on how to build a huge list and I am including an in depth study on how to drive traffic to your site so you can build a list.
But for today, I have a few questions for you. Do you have a web site to promote? If you do not, that is step one. If you do have a website to promote, and you want to get links, the easiest thing to do is to stop thinking about just getting links for the sake of getting links.
Do this instead: write articles. Short articles that are full of strong information. Like 300-500 words. At the very end of the article, write something about yourself (a bio). Then put a link to your website at the end of your bio. Submit your article to a lot of article directories. If you have written something rational, almost all of them will publish your article.
Two things happen.
1) People read your article. They like what you have to say and click your link. That creates traffic. Most of everyone on my list came here through an article. Don’t get me wrong. I do AdWords and I participate in giveaways, but my strongest traffic source is articles. By the way, it is also the hardest work I do. It is much easier to pay Google $100 and get 100 subscribers. It is much easier to send an email to a safe list and get a few subscribers. It is much easier to participate in a giveaway and get 100 subscribers for free. But the articles are solid. They are not gone tomorrow. They are read every single day, unlike a Google ad. I have articles that I wrote 9 months ago that still get clicks today. And I don’t have to do anything to keep getting traffic. But it was hard work at first writing them. No question about it.
In fact, I am planning to write a few articles today. But I would much rather be communicating with you. I would much rather add a few keywords to my AdWords campaign. But in my heart of hearts I know that if I write two articles today I have been much more productive than if I mail 10 safe lists or get 100 clicks in Google or pay for 1000 visitors somewhere.
2) The search engines pick up the link you placed in the bio and give you credit for having links. Just for fun, copy and paste the following (including the quotes) into Yahoo’s and Google’s search engine: “5 Secrets Your List-Building Competitors Hope You Never Find Out” I wrote that article about 4 weeks ago and submitted it to about 6 article directories. Now if you looked it up just now you see that I have many more links than that—and it took 15 minutes to write and about another 15 minutes to submit it to 6 (maybe 8) directories.
I hope this has been helpful. Over the next few days I am going to try to answer as many more questions as I can. I want to strike a good balance between getting this info to you and not inundating you with emails.
Again, send me your questions and I will answer as many as I can (a lot of the questions that came in were variants on the same question, so if I answer another question that is really similar and the answer would be the same for both questions, I probably won’t address both–I am sure you understand!