5 Simple, Effective Tactics to Promote a New Website
I’ve been building quite a lot of sites recently, both personally and client related. In this time I’ve observed quite a few strategies that are key to helping a site grow from scratch. Traffic is usually what the success of a website lies on, so you need to know how to build traffic as effectively as possible. Luckily, over the last 2 months I’ve helped launch over 10 sites and quickly drive them to large amounts of relevant traffic and lots of feed subscribers. With this in mind, I wanted to put together a selection of what I’ve learned; this isn’t going to be ground-breaking and you might know some of it, but putting them all in one place should make for this useful resource.
5 Tactics to Use
1. Utilise MyBlogLog
If you’ve never heard of MyBlogLog (where have you been?) then I’ll give you a quick run down. Basically, MyBlogLog is a Yahoo owned community based around your blog and its readers. When you sign-up you get to fill out your profile1 and even register your community2 which is for readers of your blog to show support. You’ll notice that any fans of your blog who are already on MBL are likely to register as part of your community. MBL also offer blog statistics, I used to use them a while ago but because of a few issues in the service i.e. some people could appear as Shoemoney when visiting sites, so I lost a bit of trust in them. My favourite part of MyBlogLog is that whenever you visit a site with their ‘visitors’ widget’, your profile is going to be shown3. Therefore, it is important to pick a relevant username and a memorable avatar. This is excellent for branding and you’ll also notice a few people checking out your profile on the site.
2. Register on Twitter
About one year ago I wouldn’t have recommended this, even though the service was around. This is mostly due to the fact that Twitter had quite a varied audience and people didn’t really think to use it to promote a website. These days however, Twitter is an excellent way to drive traffic to a site and build your name in a niche, especially with their now huge userbase. After you’ve registered on Twitter1 make sure you fill out your profile2 and use the same avatar as MyBlogLog. This is important for branding purposes and it’s also going to set you out from most users of the site. Note that people are more likely to notice your tweets (status updates) via your picture rather than your username. Once you’re all set-up you need to start adding people to follow3 and interact with from the niche of your site. If you are passionate about your niche then the discussions these people are having should interest you. There are multiple ways to find a relevant audience:
- Look for links to twitter profiles on your favourite blogs
- Perform the Google search ‘site:twitter.com “niche”‘
- Import your email contacts when you sign-up
- Try a service like TwitterTroll, a twitter search engine and look for your main keywords
If you want more people to follow you, make sure you put a link to your profile on your blog. 
3. Sign-Up to Gravatar
This one is relatively simple but it is definitely effective for branding and comment traffic. Gravatars are the avatars that show up next to comments on many blogs (this is increasing all the time) and is built by the same team that builds WordPress. Gravatar works by assigning your email address to a picture, so whenever you post a comment with a certain email, your picture will appear next to it. I’m very big on branding so I keep this the same as the avatar on Twitter and MyBlogLog. 
4. Register on StumbleUpon
Once again with StumbleUpon, I like to keep the branding and avatar theme running so whenever I sign-up or recommend others, I tell them to use either a personal name or site name for their username. Secondly, use the same image that has been used elsewhere as your avatar. Now then, there are 2 things you want to do with your StumbleUpon account: 1. Set-up your interests so you can find a lot of relevant content and 2. Stumble the blog posts of fellow niche bloggers and let them know about it in their commentsFor all the bloggers in your niche you find on the site, make sure you add them as a friend. You’ll typically find they link to their profile on their own blog, or they are always reviewing pages from their own website. When you add them make sure that you send a personal message which includes their name and ask them to add you as a friend. This can be time consuming if there are a lot of SU users in this niche but it is definitely worth the effort. Once you have started to build up your network you can help spread the traffic to others in your niche and even make use of the ‘Send-to’ function whenever you write a post of your own. One more thing I do on StumbleUpon is message all the people that thumb-up one of my personal posts. I thank them for taking the time to check out the site and also ask them to do a friend exchange. Once again, this is time consuming but it is a nice personal touch and anything to help increase traffic to your new website is a bonus.
5. Start Leaving Comments
Last but definitely not least in the list is to start leaving comments on other blogs. The follow-up to this post is going to look at all the various ways to find the top sites in a niche, there are more than you would expect. I’ve watched bloggers like Sean, Avani, Alex and Evelyn seriously increase traffic and activity on their sites by being very active on the blogs of others. I recommend commenting on other blogs for a number of reasons:
- Small amount of traffic from the site you comment on
- Increase branding & niche exposure (think: gravatar)
- Site authors are much more likely to link to your posts
- It helps establish a relationship with an author, this can definitely be helpful if you need their assistance in the future
As they always say, you can have the greatest content in the world but if you aren’t active online or promoting your articles in some way then nobody is going to see them. These steps are very simple but can also be very effective to get your brand out there and start promoting your new website.
Effective?
I did say these tactics were going to be effective and I keep to my word, think about how all of this interlinks. Whenever you visit a site to leave a comment, you are instantly shown as a visitor on their MyBlogLog widget, just for visiting. Now whenever you leave a comment, besides the traffic you get your avatar is showing next to it if they had gravatars enabled. All your comments and Stumbles are going to be a great way to build up relationships with others which you can leverage for links or promotion help whenever you write a worthy post. When that worthy post is ready, don’t forget to tweet it ;).
September 30th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Interesting post. One thing that I’ve encountered a lot is short-term thinking amongst site owners. I think many will regard these steps as not immediate enough.
Do you think they can bring in short-term benefits?
September 30th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Definitely Adi, blog commenting has been very effective in that many bloggers will include your posts when they do link roundups.
I’ve been featured on the link round-up of zen habits (70,000+ feed readers), 3 times just from writing good content and commenting on the site. This traffic has sent over 1,000 targetted visitors my way.
September 30th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
It almost sounds TOO easy…
October 1st, 2008 at 4:40 am
So, which one is the best out of all? If you had to pick just one.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:25 am
Thanks Glen. I guess it’s natural to check out the content of those that leave comments, especially if you regard the comments as quality ones.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:21 am
Hi
I’m a big fan of twitter,I took the plunge earlier this year, as to be honest I didn’t really understand it before. I use twirl to mange my tweets which cuts time no end. every time I tweet about something on my site I get lot’s of twitter traffic.
The key as I’m sure you all know with Twitter is the curiosity factor. It works every time.
Good post
Thanks
Lynne
October 1st, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Just to add, I received over 115 visitors from a comment I mad yesterday, quite amazed
October 1st, 2008 at 8:56 pm
This is a great article. I’ve heard similar advice from other’s who’ve been successful at driving traffic. But I’m curious – what types of comments drive traffic. Also, you don’t often leave a visible web address; how do people make their way back to you site?
October 1st, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Thank you for your excellent content. I can see why it was on the top of my search. Well done. Now need to apply what I’ve learnt!!
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:12 am
Can this strategy work for a larger company that has almost no social networking/web 2.0 presence at all?
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:46 am
Keep in mind that most of these tactics also all work in reverse.
1. Include your bloglog on your site
2 and 4. Promote sharing of your site “Tweet This” or “Stumble This” and while you’re at it promote sharing on other sites like Del.icio.us, Facebook, etc.
Make the most of social media’s benefits on SEO.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:15 am
Thanks for the mention and the link love.
Blog commenting is a great way of generating traffic to your site but one that requires a lot of time. However, if you are looking to build a community of friends, then I’d say that spending that extra bit of time is well worth the effort.
Maintaining a blog is like building relationships as well. If you are not keen on building relationships, then you may as well have static html pages.
In answer to Jen, when I make comments, I also write according to who I am and my experiences. I don’t post unnecessary links in the blog post just to drive traffic to my site. I consider it disrespective to the blogger whose site I’m on. Readers will naturally come to your blog if your comments resonate well with them.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Also, make sure to not give up after the first month and keep putting up more posts. Overall be tenacious.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 pm
There are many ways to skin a cat. You’ve heard that a million times in your life. Blogging or submitting comments on Blogs is the New Marketing or the voque way to bring traffic and get exposure.
My challenge is I have ADD and want to talk about far too many things :) Well not really but if you are a passionate person you can talk about a great many things.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
I agree – blog comments (when not abused) are a great shot in the arm traffic-wise. I also really like the social bookmarking profiles – nice for some links and traffic
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Great information! In this day and age of SEO and SEM scam companies, it’s good to know that there’s still something WE can do for our own websites. I’m working with my design team on 8 total website redesigns and we are including these promotional tactics as a part of our “new” SEO.
October 5th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Thank you for these tips. Create the right mix of activities will only help ones website. Today something might not help but tomorrow can a different story. This is a very fluid process and we must keep our mind open to new opportunities.
October 8th, 2008 at 5:28 am
I avoided twitter for a while, looks like it’s time for me to take a closer look :)
Time to create my own Gravatar too.. WOOT!
October 10th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
For a site that promotes SEO, it’s sure ironic that all your links are no follow!…
October 21st, 2008 at 1:10 pm
[...] If I’m promoting a new website then I want to find blogs that I can comment on and interact with. It’s likely I can receive [...]
November 19th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
I found this to be a very eye opening piece.
I have a small data processing company in Hawaii that specializes in extreme custom data cleanup and duplicate removal.
In our 11 years of existence, we have never done any serious marketing but I need to start soon.
Thanks for the great tips and resources!
Aloha,
Steve
December 8th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
[...] Glenn Allsopp offers five simple, but effective tactics to promote a new website. [SEOptimise] [...]
December 13th, 2008 at 3:09 am
To get noticeably better search engine results you should get listed in one or two high quality directories. The best one for the value, in my opinion is Best of the Web. I think the improved results make the fee worth it.
December 22nd, 2008 at 2:25 am
To add to the twitter advice, there are multiple plugins for wordpress that can automatically tweet your latest blog posts, saving you time.
Jason, nice work dropping the aff link in a comment…
January 9th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Is there any benefit to join the account in twitter and Facebook?
January 15th, 2009 at 11:42 am
[...] 5 Simple, Effective Tactics to Promote a New Website [...]
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:56 am
I would recommend your site to anyone out there who is serious about seo…thanks
February 1st, 2009 at 3:52 am
Great list of action items. I have used some along with pinging my blog using Blog Buzzer and have seen great increases in traffic.
February 13th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Hi there,
Thanks for the tips but I have a question.
I have 3 websites, should I register on Twitter per niche or just one account and later include all of my websites? pls. advice. thx
February 18th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Another great quality article. Each time I read one, I find that I have a load of work to do. At the same time realise how much I have yet to learn.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:58 am
This is a great article and was really helpful for me. I found your blog when looking for tips on using Twitter for website promotion.
I recently created a Twitter account, but am quite clueless on how best to use the service for website promotion. It just seems like Twitter came out of nowhere, and now everyone is suddenly using it!
March 4th, 2009 at 3:41 am
[...] I did say these tactics were going to be effective and I keep to my word, think about how all of this interlinks. Whenever you visit a site to leave a comment, you are instantly shown as a visitor on their MyBlogLog widget, just for visiting. Now whenever you leave a comment, besides the traffic you get your avatar is showing next to it if they had gravatars enabled. All your comments and Stumbles are going to be a great way to build up relationships with others which you can leverage for links or promotion help whenever you write a worthy post. When that worthy post is ready, don’t forget to tweet it ;). News Source: http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2008/09/5-simple-effective-tactics-to-promote-a-new-website.html [...]
March 5th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
I registered at Gravitar and I think it looks a little better to have a small picture instead of a placeholder icon. But in studying Google Analytics it looks like a record of the sites I have commented on and Twitter has sent a few also.
March 6th, 2009 at 3:43 am
Twitter are starting to think about charging for businesses to use it, so get the most out of twitter while it is still free.
March 19th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Twitter is definitely a big one. I wouldn’t have thought that StumbleUpon is a big enough generator of traffic, although I suppose everything can prove useful to an extent. StumbleUpon one sounds like most work and most time consuming one. I would also add that keeping your own tweets to Twitter ought to be on topic and relevant as much as possible. Too many people tweet about their breakfast, which I reckon should not be done.
April 1st, 2009 at 2:30 am
Being a newbie is not easy. It’s still quite funny when some of my non-blogging friends think that I blog for the sake of ‘too much free time’. Lol.. well, it’s never an easy work, and certainly not a smooth path to walk all the way till here. The tips provided are well practised, except I haven’t been too active in Stumble Upon, would love to spend some time on it someday.
An added tips, besides Twitter, it’s good to attend forums as well, extra knowledge and networking. Speak from experience. ^^
June 16th, 2009 at 4:46 am
This is very interesting article… I always stuck in driving traffic for my new website.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:46 am
Thanks a lot I`m still new about Twitter but it has potencial
August 15th, 2009 at 1:04 am
can facebook more effectively?
August 26th, 2009 at 12:58 am
well…pretty obvious suggestions though thanks for your time! I can predict Twitter’s failure within 3-5 years yet it’s OK now so it is a good place to promote your site – no doubt! You have forgotten other social networks like facebook or Myspace.
September 7th, 2009 at 3:33 am
Good stuff and I will be able to use some of the tips for my site.
October 6th, 2009 at 7:26 am
Great article, bookmarking this to revisit, as I need to implement some, and refine others.
October 28th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Definitely interested in using some of these strategies for the short term and long term benefits. I haven’t used MyBlogLog or a Gravatar yet, but I’m going to look into getting these rocking. Thanks!
October 30th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
I realize this post is a year old already. I still agree with most of these suggestions. Especially 2, 4, and 5. Let’s cut to the chase, the golden rule is go where your market is. Hang out in their environment. Get comfortable there. Get to know those people, their behaviors, and their needs. Furthermore, add something of value to that environment. Contribute to conversations, provide insight, provoke thought. And, for goodness sake, act HUMAN! It’s that simple. :)
May 31st, 2010 at 9:26 am
thanks for the valuable information. you are right, participation is important.
August 26th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
I have read a number of sites and blogs but this certainly is a different approach compared to the usual tips and methods to promoting a site. This tactics of yours involves alot of socialization. But really, I would advice not to overdo promoting your site alone. Just as Marilyn said, ‘Act Human!’… But generally, I’d approve doing these types of methods on promoting a website.