Website Promotion Plan for 2009

After you've spent a good chunk of time and/or money to build the site of your dreams and create the product that would bring you a lot of profit it is time to start thinking about promotion. But how do you get traffic if you are just starting out and have no advertising budget?

By providing valuable content and promoting it steadily day after day, month after month. No serious person would believe on the online ads that says start making money within days. Those times are long gone or reserved only for the gurus in the business with 10+ years of practice.

What you need is as many links as possible relevant to your topic pointing to various pages on your website to beat your competitors. How do you do that?

You need a Plan.

Below is a step by step guide that includes attracting links and traffic with 0$ investment, just your time.

In order to execute your actions you need to be prepared with the right tools at hand. It is kind of boring but you have to set up around 100 accounts:)

Pre steps:

Describe your topic - based on the topic of your website you need to find a list of networks and website you can promote your content on. For example sphinn.com for online marketing or sylehive.com for clothes. They are out there just find them. Once you have 5-10 of those networks you need to create accounts and feature your content. Here are the other places you need to be in.

Websites to create accounts at:

SocialMarker.com - use this free tool to automate content promotion and bookmarking. / choose most relevant websites to your topic - say 5 - 10 /

Ping.fm - Get on as many social networks as you can here. Use this free tool to let your connections know when you have good content on your site. Usually I would leave twitter, facebook and linked in where you manually post your updates. REMEMBER: Social Networks are called social because they are Social not Business. Although you are a business and want to profit, keep a good ration about your updates try to talk 50/50 about yourself and you business/service. If you tweet business only people will not likely buy from you because they have not had the chance to know the person behind the product.

Yahoo answers - Use this service to answer questions related to your services. Still highly valuable and featured in search engine results.

Forums - Become a member of forums related to your topic so you can comment.

Now that you have created all those accounts / wow, you need a spreadsheet for that :)/ it is time to set up a plan for success.

Content Promotion Action Plan

Daily

- Create 1 or more pieces of content (text, images)

- Social Bookmark your content

- Use ping.fm to post on your social networks

- Update Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed /the networks you enjoy the most/

Weekly

- Leave 3-5 comments on other blogs that have relevant content to your topic

- Resolve 1 -3 issues on yahoo answers or forums related to your topic

Monthly

- Post 1-2 articles about your topic on  article websites

- Create a video tutorial for your prospects on a task related to your business that they will find useful

Every 2-3 Months

- Review your keyword trends, adjust your content and targeting.

- Release a 15 - 20 page report about your industry and offer it for free in exchange for people's emails. Your email list and your twitter followers can serve you great in assessing your service and product quality.

Every 6 months

- Organize a live Q&A Webinar about your business.

This simple 8 point plan is so powerful that guarantees you will dominate your market within 8 months of starting your online business. Of course, given you do everything the right way and your niche is not "travel" or "real estate":).

What are your comments?