Promoting Website

I have thought about how I will promote my website so people will know about and visit it so I have done some research to try find out the most effective ways to promote websites. The methods I felt were suitable for my site and the ones I could use are:

• Social networking sites
• Online forums and directories
• Leaflets

Social Networking Sites:

Social networking sites can be a good way to promote businesses and websites and used to advertise products and services because these sites have many users that visit the networking site regularly. The site I have chosen to use is Facebook. This is because my website is aimed at a young audience and a lot of young people use Facebook (the average age of users that use Facebook is 26yrs). The way I would promote my website would be to create a Facebook page and include information on that page to persuade users to visit my website. In the about section, I would have a short paragraph saying what the gift finder site is about and how it works. On the main page I would post special offers, new products etc when they come available but I would try to make sure I posted quality content so people are not put off the page. There would also be my website address and email address in the information section.

Online Forums & Directories:

From research I have done to find out how to promote websites, I have found out more about link building. Link building helps a website perform better in search engine results because they look at the websites popularity and this helps the search engine position each website in their results. Search engines use page ranks to determine a websites position and the higher the page rank, the higher the position so it is important to get other websites to link to my website. The way I could get more sites to link to my website would be to add my web address to web directories and forums. This would not only improve the website's performance in search engines but would also take people from the forum or directory direct to my website so I could potentially get more users visiting my website.

Leaflets:

Another way to promote my website would be to design and print leaflets with information about the website and the web address. Leaflet dropping would be an option so a lot of people would get to know about the website and also these could be placed in shops and noticeboards in different towns and villages around Hull to promote the Princes Avenue and Newland Avenue area of Hull.

Websites used for this research:
www.socialmediatoday.com/smc/78505
www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklists.htm