The bad news is a productive link exchange program takes quite a bit of time and effort, and will take up to six months or more to do properly.

The good news is there are website promotion professionals who will plan and execute a link exchange program for you as part of a package of promotion services. This makes it very economical. See "website promotion programs".

4. Write Articles in your field of expertise, and distribute them wherever you can

Publishing articles in online publications, directories and ezines is one of most effective and least expensive kinds of website promotion. It is a perfect way to generate interest in your site, and create traffic.

Well written articles can be used to highlight various aspects of your products or services. At same time you will establish yourself as an authority in your field. And articles you write and publish today will continue to be available on web for years to come.

Distributing articles is also an important way to create incoming links. Other websites and ezines publish your articles and in process create links pointing back to your website.

5. Turn visitors into leads

The online sales process starts with traffic — visitors to your site. But traffic is not enough. You want to turn some of these visitors into leads. A "lead" is a visitor who expresses an interest by contacting you. This puts them in "most-likely-to-buy" category, and gives you a clearly defined group of people you can target with more specific sales messages.

To capture leads you need a carefully planned strategy. You need to get beyond usual "send us an email for more information" approach.

Simple online forms backed up with autoresponders are perfect for this task.

6. Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising for instant traffic

Pay-Per-Click advertising — especially Google Adwords — can be an amazingly powerful tool to reach your exact target market and generate pre-qualified, targeted leads almost instantly.

But this service is also becoming increasingly expensive. And when you make mistakes they can be very costly. There are ways of maximizing your Google Adwords results. Ways you have probably not heard about. These techniques can save you thousands of dollars, and greatly increase effectiveness of your Adwords campaigns.

The best website promotion program is one that combines all six of these techniques into an organized program. If you are too busy getting your business started, or too busy servicing your clients, then your best bet is to look for a website promotion professional who can prepare and maintain a program for you.

For more details about such a program see "website promotion programs".

New software tools like Offermatica (available at www.Offermatica.com) are focused on providing merchants or direct marketers with these types of optimizations.

Customer Case

For example, one company sold games for children and adults online and generated traffic around search terms largely selected by brand names of games they sold. This strategy was effective, but words were competitive and they wanted more revenue per purchase. Using Offermatica, they providing an automated list of top-selling products on pages where target products were displayed, company increased their AOV by 20% against a control group.

In another case, a company represents travel products that have radically different gross margins. The company should continue to drive traffic from external and internal search to low-margin properties, but could also begin to purposefully display higher-margin alternatives in same region and price range to increase profitability of their acquired customers.

Finally, a consumer products retailer that generated much of their traffic around a limited range of brand-name products tested a gift-with-purchase strategy to try to increase conversion rates on expensive brand-based terms.

None of these marketing approaches are earth-shattering. They reflect well-trodden paths lain down by traditional retailers, catalog retailers, and even late-night infomercials. They are also very effective.

Any retailer can drive traffic if they pay enough, and anyone can refine traffic to pay relatively little for relatively low traffic. The search engine future, however, belongs to those who can sell enough to pay enough for a large, growing base of online customers.

Matthew Roche Offermatica www.offermatica.com