Be sure to add your award program to Website Awards Worksheet at http://websiteawards.xe.net/ as soon as you are finished. You will get some visitors from this worksheet. It's a good idea to make sure you have gotten your award listed in Awardsites before you submit to worksheet.

There are other places to get your award listed. Search them out and apply as you see fit. Generally, I've found these by applying for awards - usually banners and buttons for these different programs are listed on same page as awards. Believe me, though, amount of traffic you get from ALL of other listings will probably be less than a good listing in Awardsites.

Oh yes, one thing to avoid is those programs which allow visitors to "automatically" submit to your awards program without visiting your site. My advice is to avoid these like plague. Why? Well, these mean you will spend quite a bit of time looking at sites, but award winners (and losers) will probably never see yours. That throws out implicit exchange.

It also means that people who submit have not read your criteria, which means you will get lots of worthless submissions that you should never have received in first place.

In addition, I've found that by far most of sites submitted in this manner do not measure up. In other words, amount of effort that award submission process requires is so small that sites are often not even worth visiting.

Where else do you promote your awards program?

- In your signature line on every email that you send out.

- As part of every single autoresponder message that you send. You should be sending an autoresponder follow-up for every guestbook signing, email form submission and anything else entered by visitors. Those autoresponder messages should include a brief promotion for your awards program.

- Anywhere else that you would promote your website.

If you do these things, you will most likely find that people will be submitting their sites to your awards programs in droves.

After you decide on a contest that compliments products you sell and also wets appetite of your target audience, get busy submitting your contest to leading freebie, contest, and sweepstake directories. These directories will bring you good traffic. One such place to start is The Freebie Directory (http://freebiedirectory.com). From directory you can submit your contest to 100 or more freebie, contest and sweepstakes sites. Keep in mind that many of these sites will request a reciprocal link from you. Create a link page before you place your submissions so you can complete process of submitting your site to 100+ contest directories in less than a few hours. Once you're in, you'll notice immediate results!

At http://www.chistell.com we recently ran 1st Annual Chistell Poetry Contest. The response was overwhelming!