Internet marketing for newbies

It is time to learn some basic website promotion skills. After you have done your research and development, it is time to let the world know about your content. Here is how to start:

1. Tell your friends about it
2. Participate in related Forums
3. Use social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit
4. Comment on related Blogs
5. Exchange links with other related Websites
   
6. Submit your site to Web Directories
   

If you have lot of friends online, it would be a good idea to notify them about your new site. Specially if some of them would be willing to contribute or help. This will help add more content to the site and you will have more time to concentrate on marketing and conversion.

If you do not have many friends who can spread the word, you can use other, so called 'social' tools, on the Internet. Online forums are one of the oldest forms of Internet communication. You can find forums about your niche, sign in and participate in discussion. Many forums will allow you to have a signature where you can link to your site. Better forums will allow you to put a rss feed from your blog to your profile, so every time you post n the forum your latest article will be promoted.

Social bookmarking sites became very popular in recent years. They will provide you with instant promotion and, if you have really interesting content, with instant traffic. Since this is only an introductory article I will not go in depth with using with using these services, but I will only recommend one site called SocialMarker.com. Basically it will allow you to submit your site to a number of social bookmarking services in a very accessible way.

Commenting on related blogs is a way to make a network of friends. You should find blogs that are related to your topic, judge that the author is very passionate about it and then read as much of their's content as possible. That will give you an idea about how the author is thinking about your mutual topic. This will allow you to get in the discussion with them which will become an opportunity to point out your own site with related content. Just always be sure to be polite and not intrusive. Think what kind of comments would you like to have on your blog and write appropriately.

Exchanging links with other related sites is like planting seeds for the future. When you find a site or a blog related to yours, you might want to ask the owner to exchange links. Making sure that you have good content first is crucial. Also choose only sites that you are comfortable linking to, as that will reflect on your future ranking. Try to use sites that are similarly ranked as yours. If you are just starting best bet is to search for other new sites. When I said planting seeds, it can happen that the site you exchanged links with becomes very popular in the future and you get a share of that popularity.

Submitting your site to web directories is usually a dull process. Web directories made a lot of sense in 1990s when search engines where non existent and in order to find something you went to a web directory and browsed through an interesting category. Nowadays web directories become more and more obsolete and their value is in it that you get a free link to your site. number of visitors that are coming from these directories is usually very minimal.

Using link to your website in forums and social bookmarking sites is the fastest way to have your site indexed by a search engine. You should never submit your site to search engine, always use this natural way. It is not uncommon to have your site index in a mater of hours using methods described in this article.

If you want to learn little bit more about these techniques check this article. If you think you are ready for some more advanced techniques then proceed to this article.