5 Website Promotion Myths
October 6th, 2007I’ve run across a fair amount of new webmasters who have some pretty interesting views on website promotion. Some things that they think are pretty outlandish and just not true. Here are the five most common myths that I have come across:
1. All Link Exchanges Are Good - sorry, but no. Reciprocal link exchanges have pretty much no benefit for SEO and in most cases should not be done. However, if the two sites are on the same topic you may wish to perform a reciprocal link exchange for the benefit of drawing targeted visitors, but you still won’t improve your search rankings. Link farms should especially be steered clear from.
One-way links are the holy grail of website promotion - they carry a lot more weight with them in terms of SEO, and are almost always targeted. How do you attract these one-way links? Write solid content with great headlines.
2. A Big Promotion Budget Means Big Results - having money to throw around is not going to make your website successful. You can’t just stop at getting the visitor to your website - you have to sell to them, also. Make them want to buy your product or subscribe to your feed and become repeat visitors or whatever your objective is.
Before you spend even a dime on website promotion you need to carefully design your site with your visitors in mind. Just because you would buy from your site does not mean that other visitors will want to. Know your audience and how to sell to them before wasting your money. Work on getting your conversion rates high first before you aim for larger amounts of traffic. Remember, you don’t need to have a big budget (or any budget at all) to become successful.
3. Design Is Everything - one cannot underestimate the importance of a good design, but without great content, the design will mean nothing. Your website design should work to compliment your content, which is the main focus of your website. Use your design to draw the reader in and spotlight your articles, focusing their attention.
There is no excuse nowadays to have a crappy template with the proliferation of good, free templates all around the internet, but you also don’t need to be spending all of your resources and time trying to create the perfect design - text is what sells. You don’t buy a book based on the cover, you buy it based on the content. The cover may be what draws you in, but the text is what sells you. Your priorities should be: good design, great content.
4. Anybody Can Create A Successful Website - false. It’s a lot harder than it looks. It takes a huge amount of time and dedication. That is why 90% of new blogs don’t make it past two months. Only if you are willing to put hours into research, learning, building, and promoting, and realize that you will fail multiple times before you succeed, will you be able to become successful. There is a huge change in what it takes to build and run websites as a hobby and as a business.
5. If You Build It, They Will Come - just creating a website does not guarantee that visitors will come to it. Google has over one billion websites in its database, and you can bet that a thousand of them are very similar to yours. If you just do what everyone else is doing you will get the same mediocre results. To truly get attention and attract visitors, however, you need to be unique. Do something that no one else is doing, put a new spin on an old idea, or just do it better. You need to have a good answer as to why a user would rather go to your site instead of one of the other thousand that offer the same thing.
6. Yours - what do you think is the biggest website promotion myth?
As you can see, building a successful website is not easy. It is, however, an exciting and rewarding journey if you are dedicated to it.
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By Karol Krizka on Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
I think that the biggest promotion myth is that “traffic is everything”. While it’s true that traffic is important, I rather have 100 visitors that like the content and visit again, than 1000 visitors that stumble on my site and close it right after.
By Nick on Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
I agree, Karol. Targeted traffic is everything. I would even go as far to say that I would take 10 highly targeted visitors instead of 1000 untargeted visitors.
By WarriorBlog on Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
I agree that paid traffic isn’t alway the best, but PPC is one of my favorites :-)
Two of the thing I worry about most is first impression and quality content, which you stated.
I really don’t know what to say for 6 but thats a good list :-) Thank you for visiting and take man :-)
By Nick on Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
PPC is great because you get instant results, but I only use it for affiliate marketing. I decided in the beginning that I would not spend any money promoting Abstract Promotion - all organic traffic.
By CHESSNOID on Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
Great post. Although, for my purposes, I will take any traffic.
By Alex R on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
Some great quotes in there Nick! “Write solid content with great headlines.” , “The cover may be what draws you in, but the text is what sells you.” Preach it brother!
As for the sitxth promotion myth it’s rather difficult to say, because you’ve written 5 of the largest ones. I’m new to promotion, but I won’t let that be an excuse. Here’s my newbish stab at it - Believing what the larger niche sites are offering whether advice or resources.
By Nick on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
Good myth, Alex - it gives me an idea to branch from it - “Copying from the successful sites and expecting to get the same results”. While one should definitely observe and learn from sites that have become successful, pure imitation won’t also make your site a success.
By Alex R on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
Yep, expecting what “others” have accomplished is the wrong way to envision yourself. You should see what has made them successful, and use that for personal gain.
I have a question for you. Where it says share and enjoy are you typing this or is it a plugin? Your google ad is it the same way?
By Nick on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
“Share and Enjoy” is from the plugin called Sociable, which automatically adds those options to the end of every post. The Adsense I added myself inside of the single post template (I don’t copy-paste the code every time I make a new post).
By Karen Zara on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
The sixth myth would be this: “Get your post in the front page of Digg and you’ll never run out of visitors (and money) again.”
Many people seem to be desperate to game Digg. They don’t realise that diggers aren’t likely to become loyal visitors, nor will they click on ads and make purchases.
By Nick on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
Exactly Karen. Digg traffic is notorious for not clicking on ads and not coming back. I submit to Digg mostly for the benefit of getting all my articles indexed in a day.
By Karen Zara on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
“I submit to Digg mostly for the benefit of getting all my articles indexed in a day.”
Since you’ve raised this matter, let me ask you a couple questions: is it enough to just submit your articles to Digg? Isn’t it necessary to get a good amount of votes to get said articles indexed by Google?
By Nick on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
Nope, that’s the great thing. Google crawls Digg’s upcoming stories daily so all you need to do is get your article on that list by submitting it.
By Karen Zara on Oct 7, 2007 | Reply
Oh, I didn’t know it! That’s a great tip. Thank you for sharing. You’ve just gotten a new feed subscriber. :)
By Matt Williams on Oct 12, 2007 | Reply
The myth that bugs me, and kind of relates to website promotion is “we don’t have any disabled visitors in our audience so we don’t need to make our website accessible”.
By Nick on Oct 12, 2007 | Reply
Well said, Matt. A lot of webmasters tend to just ignore their minority visitors, figuring that it is not worth the effort.
By Karen Zara on Oct 12, 2007 | Reply
@Matt Williams: I’m glad that you’ve raised this matter. I’ve been researching this topic, but unfortunately it’s not that easy to find info on how to make a site more accessible for disabled visitors. It’s a shame, because a site should be promoted to *all* potential visitors.