Website Promotion In A NutshellWritten by Jeff Colburn
The Internet is made up of 10,000,000 pages of text, with over 7.3 million pages being added every day. Without an aggressive promotion program, your site will disappear in crowd. But don't worry, there are many different things you can do to get traffic you want that require varying levels of time and energy. Start with simplest thing first. Listing your site on search engines is always your initial step. You can do this easily with sites like http://www.AddMe.com. On AddMe.com you can list your site on about 14 search engines at no cost. For a fee of between $30 and $50, they will list your site once on about 1,200 search engines, newsgroups and other similar places. Your next step is to list your website address onto everything that people will see. This includes flyers, booklets, advertising, product labels, business cards, signs, press releases, phone book listing, invoices and your after-hours answering machine message. A simple message, like "We're sorry we missed you, but to find out more about our company visit our website at www.OurBusiness.com." If you can write articles, you have an excellent way to promote your website. All you have to do is write short articles, about 300 to 500 words, covering topics of interest to people who visit your site. Then post these articles on your website and on free articles sites. I live in Arizona, but my articles have appeared in publications, ezines and websites all over world. Because of this, I've had clients from all over country, including New York, New Jersey and Little Rock, Arkansas. I even have an e-mail auto responder set up on each article page so that people who want to use article can have it automatically e-mailed to them. It's always nice to have my articles help others, and in turn to have others promote my business. If you want to list articles on free article sites, try these. http://www.ideamarketers.com http://www.goarticles.com http://www.webpronews.com/submit.html http://www.netterweb.com/articles There are many other sites like this out there, just Google for "free articles site."
| | Use Server Side Includes To Ease Your WorkloadWritten by Jeff Colburn
I’m all for making things as easy as possible. The whole idea in business, and life, is to work smarter not harder. When designing websites, I not only want to create them with as little effort as possible, but I also want to make maintaining them easy. One way to do this is with Server Side Includes (SSI). SSI’s are an easy way to add or update content to one or more web pages on a site. One way I use SSI’s is for copyright on my pages. By changing year in one file, it changes year on all of my pages. I also use SSI’s for links on my pages. If I decide to add or remove a link, or rearrange them, I simply make changes in one file and my entire site is automatically updated. As I said before, make it easy. Why should I go to each of 80 plus pages on my site to change something when I can do same thing with one little file? Another great thing about SSI’s is that you can’t see them on a web page. If you, or anyone, view contents of your page, SSI won’t show. Instead, you will only see HTML put there by SSI. Before you try to use SSI’s you need to check with your web host to see if server is set up for them. Most servers are. If they say they are, then you need to do a little test. Create a web page with following HTML. Testing SSI Save this as an HTML file and upload it to your server. Now try to open page with your browser. If you see current weekday, like Monday, Tuesday, etc. then you can start using SSI’s. If you don’t see anything, rename file extension. Instead of using HTML use SHTML. Some servers require “S” and others don’t. Another thing you need to know is that you shouldn’t use SHTML extension on your Home or Index page. Spiders don’t like it and won't be able to Index page on their search engines. Now that you know your server will let you use SSI’s, let’s start saving time. The first thing you need to do is create a text (.TXT) file that contains information you want to include. This can be graphics, text, links or anything else you want to include. You will want to include HTML that you would normally put on a web page. Think of this text file as something that will be pasted into your web page, since this is exactly what will happen.
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