Review these six following tips (one of which is indeed dedicated to those essential search engines), and you'll honor the hard work you put into creating your website by making sure people visit and appreciate your fine work, products, and services.

Online Opps (Opportunities)

1. Email: The "Paul Revere" of Online Announcements
Chances are your website meets a very specific need. In many cases, there are email lists which already exist to service this segment. Subscribe to them! Contribute valuable content when you speak up. Plant your web address, along with a reason for visiting, in your "sig file." Don't go overboard though: they should only be about four or five lines long.

You can also go one step further and advertise on a list. This is one of the best kept secrets of online advertising. Ads are cheap to buy and there are no production costs since the ads are done is ascii. How do you advertise on these lists? After you sign up and read the FAQ, you'll know if the list accepts adverts or not. Usually .edu's and .org's don't accept ads; not all .com's do either. Rates are usually very cheap since the list owner probably has no formal sales plan to sell the ads. Ask for a rate card. See if others are advertising. If they are, it may be a barter situation. You can play the barter game with ad exposures for his list on your site. If you don't find a list that serves your particular niche, think seriously about starting one before someone else does. Search all three of the following mailing list databases, since no one database has everything:

• The List of Lists
  
• Liszt
  
• Publicly Accessible Lists
  

2. The ones most likely to visit your site are the ones who have been there before
It seems a shame so many sites go to the trouble and expense to erect sites and drag people to them, only to eventually let them get away, never to be seen again. Offer your visitors a reason to give you their email address. The reason can be as simple as it being an easy way for them to be notified when the site is updated. If they really like you, they'll sign up. If they don't, they won't -- which means you've got some thinking to do.

Be sure to place a text field (where visitors can submit their email address) on every single page of your website. After all, you've come into websites through the side door from a search engine which gave you a second layer page ahead of the home page, right? The same thing will happen to your visitors. Make sure the visitor sees the opportunity to subscribe to your reminder service in the **top portion** of any page they land on. Remember, a lot of people don't scroll. Why? Who cares? Maybe they don't know how to. Or perhaps they're just antsy and click on the first button they see.

Finally, always remember to assure the subscriber their email address will not be sold. I've seen subscribership increase when this is added. If you're planning on asking for more than just an email address, you have to make it obvious to the reader that whatever you're providing is deserving of forking over more information. You don't want too many to leave indignantly. Even though my newsletter Web Digest For Marketers enjoys a good reputation, a good 20% of people who start filling out my subscription form don't finish. Why? I ask for five fields of information, including their name, company, title, email address, and where they heard of WDFM.

3. Use an online announcing service
NetPost is the best and most expensive announcement service because Eric Ward posts every single press release manually. He sends them to his hundreds of contacts, each with a personal message. He won't send a press release to an inappropriate journalist, editor or news outlet because it would impugn his reputation.

If you can't afford Eric, try an online press release service like The Newsroom. For less than $200, you can send your press release to hundreds of news outlets and "What's New" sites in a matter of minutes. I suggest you couple this distribution with an offline PR service to hit traditional outlets as well (see Tip #5). Many online outlets aren't reached by traditional services and vice versa.

4. Seeding the Search Engines
The truth is I could fill a book with what you should and shouldn't do when submitting your site for the search engines, but you and I don't have time for that. I'm going to give you some quick tips here and refer you to the Bible of the search engine guides, namely "Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Report". If you don't wish to concentrate on search engines, simply go to Submit-It and you can submit your site to all the major ones (and lots of less major ones) in one swell fwoop. However, be aware this is a cookie-cutter approach. One submission must be basic enough to fit within the guidelines of all the search engines. You're not able to take full advantage of the differences each have to offer. One engine may allow 75-word descriptions, but you'll have only supplied 25 words to submit-it.

Search engines often have bots (robots) that visit your site and index a good piece of what they find there. Make sure your Meta and Alt tags are filled out with the words that visitors are apt to search for. However, just because Meta and Alt tags aren't readily seen, doesn't mean you can put 5000 keywords in there. These bots are getting pretty savvy about seeing those patterns and deleting what some call "reverse spammers" from the index altogether. In short, don't go there!

You may want to employ the use of a service called PositionAgent which will show where you're coming up in the various search engines. My advice to you, as mentioned earlier, is not to solely focus on the search engines. Practice due diligence by reading Danny's newsletter and the archives, but don't get obsessed. If you really want to come out at the top of the search engine results, you can always buy the banner at the top of that page.

Offline Opps

5. Offline Promotion is as important -- or more important -- than online efforts
Nothing validates an online venue like an offline mention. Have you ever tried to take a quote from a website and put it in your clips file? It isn't easy. Being seen in print means that a publisher or advertiser thinks the effort worthwhile enough to pay the extra freight of paper, print, and distribution. Of course, if you've got a network of radio or TV stations at your disposal, that would help too:).

Send out a press release over PR Newswire or Business Wire. Don't make the mistake of buying the entire country for $600. Most likely, you don't need that; rather, you should buy your local metro market for between $90 and $140. Both services will then give you two or three industry circuits over which your press release will go out. I typical choose Advertising/Marketing, Financial, Publishing, or Hi-Tech/Internet. If you send the press release out over PR Newswire, it will also travel over the PointCast Network, which has a cumulative audience of over one million viewers.

6. Advertising in Traditional Media
If you've got the funds to advertise, go for it. If you're buying your own advertising, it might be worthwhile to start an in-house agency. Then you can take advantage of the 15% discount media outlets typically offer advertisers. You will probably have to make up stationery and even business cards, invoices, and insertion orders with this new letterhead. If you're buying more than once, it's probably worthwhile to do this. If not, maybe you can get the 15% discount by simply asking for it.

Make sure everything is denominated in CPM's (cost per thousand). You need a common denominator to judge which advertising will serve you best. Before negotiating, look at the publication carefully. See what kind of advertisers they currently have. Are any like you? Maybe you know some of the advertisers well enough to call them up and see how effective their ads are. Here again, make sure your ad gives people a clear-cut reason why they should visit your site.

BTW, don't shoot all your wad in one blast. After all, you're going to want to have some buckshot left over for later in the year when you have some major event, promotion, or attraction set up to draw them in.