How to Promote Your Website/Blog?

Looking for free tips of how to promote your website/blog? Over the years I’ve learned tips all over the place from Internet on how to promote a website/blog. I think it is better listing them here so whoever stumbles on My Internet Stuff site will find them useful here:

1. Write informative articles about your niche so people will link to you. This is call link-bait.
2. Submit different version of those informative articles to major article directories. If people like your article, they will post it in their sites. So you’ll get one-way link even for Free.
3. Join forums that are related to your niche. Set up your profile there so your signature link will point back to your website/blog.
4. Sign up social bookmarking sites and post your links there. Although most of them don’t provide do-follow links, still you’ll get traffic from them.
5. Find relevant websites/blogs to comment on. If allowed, leave your link there to point back to your website/blog. Most website/blog owners don’t mind that as long as what you said is natural and relevant to his/her site.
6. Sign up for Google Alert with the keywords of your niche. That is how you can  find relevant websites/blogs to comment on.
7. Become an expert of answering questions in Yahoo Answers. If necessary, you can provide helpful links back to your website/blog.
8. Participate in Google Group and Yahoo Group and have your signature link pointed back to your website/blog.
9. Make sure every website/blog of yours has 404 search friendly page. This will help your potential customers to find related articles.
10. Build an opt-in form of collecting potential customers in your niche. As some experts said, “Money is in the LIST”.
11. Provide RSS or any other social bookmarklets to allow your visitors to react with.
12. Submit your website/blog to directories of your niche. Moreover, you can even submit your RSS feed to RSS directories.
13. Sign up for Squidoo and Hubpages, write about your niche, and have links pointed back to your website/blog.
14. Use robots.txt file to control certain files if you don’t want your website/blog to end up with duplicated contents.
15. When you create your articles, make sure you have your keywords written within the title. Good headlines will attract more potential customers.
16. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
17. Exchange your link with the relevant websites/blogs. Overall it will help you in a long run.
18. Nowadays video marketing is a very popular way of promoting your website/blog.
19. Sign up a Free account in Craigslist.org, and post your website/blog within your ads. Make sure you don’t spam.
20. Provide Google Translate for your foreign visitors so you can keep them informed. Although Google Translate is not 100% accurate, it is better than nothing.

I am sure there are more ways of promoting your website/blog than the above list. Maybe you’ll tell me more in the comment section? Do you like the list above? How helpful is it to your website/blog? Feel free to voice your opinion here.

How Fast Google and Yahoo! Indexed My New Blog!

Wow! How fast Google and Yahoo! indexed my new blog! I’ve just started on April 13, 2008 (exactly two weeks’ ago). When I typed site: myinternetstuff.wordpress.com in Google Search Engine. I could see a list of all My Internet Stuff sub-titles indexing at Google; see the screenshot below:

Click on the picture to enlarge

Yahoo! also indexed my new blog so fast but did not list as many sub-titles as Google; see the screenshot below:

Click on the picture to enlarge.

I don’t know for sure whether fast indexing has something to do with my submission to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer. Anyway, I am happy about it.

Update: Google just indexed What Can You Do With Your API Key? – a post I wrote today (4/28/2008)8) less than one minute. I am really amazed.

Submit Your WordPress.com Blog to Yahoo!

In my previous post, How to Add Google Sitemap to WordPress.com Blog?, I talked about how you can submit a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. Yahoo! Site Explorer has similar services too. If you are interested, type your URL (World Wide Web address) in the text field and click on Add My Site button. Then it will lead you to Yahoo! Sign UP page. From there, you have two choices. If you already have a Yahoo! account, then you may just sign in; if you don’t have a Yahoo! account, then you have to sign up one here.

Once you are inside, you can see that your URL has been added. Now you have to submit your blog feed to Yahoo! by clicking on Authenticate button. It will lead you to a new page. You can see your authentication key like y_key_82890f6bb720e757.html and a string like 038ccdf3a8dff73a. You have two options to authenticate your blog there:

1. to upload a verification file to your site or
2. to add a META tag to your home page.

Since you know you can’t add a META tag to your home page if you own a WordPress.com blog. That is because you don’t have privileges to access your home page’s HTML file. Therefore you have to create a new page from Write/Page WordPress.com Dashboard . You can name whatever title you want, but make sure its permalink looks like this: http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/y_key_82890f6bb720e757.html. Make sure you replace yoursitename with your own site name and y_key_82890f6bb720e757.html with your own authenticate key.

Yahoo! Site Explorer also tells you to put your string into the new page you’ve just created. Click Ready to Authenticate button. It will show you a new page saying “Your site is pending authentication”. Check it later to make sure your site’s status is OK. If it is, then congratulations! You just successfully added your feed to Yahoo!. Make sure you check your Yahoo! Site Explorer regularly. It will report back to you if anything goes wrong.

Update: You can keep the new page you’ve created privately once it is authenticated. Keep in mind that you need to authenticate it again if you see failed button showing up on the status of your blog/website.