The following is an article I just posted on ezine articles, normally I never cross post but on this occassion I think it is worth while.  If you just promote a site without thinking about exactlky what you are doing then this post is for you..

“Would you walk into a restaurant hand the waiter $100 and then walk out?? Would you go to Wal Mart pay for your weeks shopping and then leave it in the store? Of course you wouldn’t but why do you do the same thing with your websites?

For some reason people seem to think nothing of building a website then moving onto the next one before they’ve even finished promoting the original one. I can understand this as i have often got renewal requests for websites that I had completely forgotten about.

The latest was ranking at #1 in Google for a keyword phrase with almost 6,000,000 broad matches. The annoying thing was it hadn’t been monetized! Just because I am an idiot it doesn’t mean to say you need to be one too.

Part of the problem is that building websites and researching is fun whilst promoting them is boring and repetitive. None of us wants to spend out days getting back links and submitting out sites to various directories.

Luckily there are two ways around this, the first is outsourcing. Outsourcing the boring repetitive tasks is a good idea but only if your existing sites are making money. If they aren’t or you are starting out then the best way is to get your hands on some automated site promotion tools.

Site promotion tools can knock hours off of the time it takes to promote a site leaving you more time to do the things you enjoy. Why spend 5 hours submitting your sites RSS feeds to various aggregators when a tool can do it in 8 minutes.

It’s always much better to work smarter than to work harder!!”

If you are interested in making site promotion easier you can grab my free report “Quick and Easy Site Promotion” from http://automatedsitepromotion.com

If you go into any Internet marketing related forum you will read loads of posts about how best to promote your sites and what SEO you should be doing.  Now this may suprise you but 90% of what you read is pure and simply rubbish. People read something in one forum and post it in another without ever testing it out themselves.  This is why you should stop what you are doing right now and conduct your own Website Promotion Exercise.

So what is a website promotion exercise? Simply put it’s selecting a keyword phrase which doesn’t have many competing pages and using as many methods as you can think of to get pages ranking for that phrase.

So For example say we took the Phrase “Website Promotion Exercise” and decided to see if we could get it ranking there are several things you could do.

1. Place a post on some blogs with differing Page ranks and see which ranks higher the highest Page ranked site or the most relevant site. 

2. Use clipmarks and twitter and see which brings the best results.

3. Add a squidoo lens and a Hubpage 

4. Use services like Zimbo, Gather and Wetpaint and see which one outranks the others.

I could go on but I am sure you get the idea. Only when you’ve run tests like this will you know exactly what works and what doesn’t. I would recommend repeating the tests every 6 months or so as google tends to favor certain sites for a while and then move on to others. 

To  make it more fun you could challange a friend or group of friends to a competition and see who gets ranked highest.  Give it a go today it will really pay off the next time you build a site.

Before I get into this post it’s time for a rant. The last post I created I wrote In Microsoft Word and then copied it into the blog post. I checked it in my default browser (FireFox)and it looked fine. This morning I happened to open the blog up in Internet explorer and There was a huge problem only half the blog post showed up and nothing else not even a sidebar.

I couldn’t even access the site via IE. Luckily I got in via FireFox and found that Word had added a lot of code to the post and that was causing the problem. Once I removed it it was fine. Wouldn’t it be nice if Microsoft products worked well together!!

So here is a public service announcement. Open office 3 is now available as is Google’s Chrome browser and FireFox. I used to stand by Microsoft’s products as the generally worked well and were well supported but recently something seems to have gone a bit wrong. Office is no longer intuitive and I can’t find half the functions I need and IE is a complete PIA, every time I try to check my awstats using it I get errors!

So Today I am having an MS free day. I am on my Linux Box, and tomorrow I’ll be using open office and FireFox or chrome. Just to try to prove to myself that i don’t need MS. I also feel a MAC coming on!

Right back to the original reason for this post. One of the first posts I ever made to this blog was about my end of month routine (you’ll find it under the site promotion category). This routine still works well and ensures that very few of my sites fail to make me money.

I’ll reiterate the key point of the original post here. At the end of each month check the bandwidth usage of all of your sites. Pick the ones with the least usage check them for errors and if you can’t find any do some promotion on them.

I tend to choose the bottom 5 sites, if after a few months of this a site is still in the bottom 5 I’ll probably abandon it as it’s more than likely never going to make me money. Over the space of the 2 years I’ve been doing this I’ve only got rid of 2 sites that were complete failures.

Try it for a few months and you’ll find your income from those sites increases. One site I worked on 2 months ago has since had 2 sales paying $100 for each sale.

Looking back at the last few posts it seems i’ve been a bit Negative and “Preachy ” so to get some balance here is a list of 5 really great tools which will help you get your sites to the next level. The great thing about them is that they are free.  These aren’t listed in any particular order just whichever order I think of them!

1. Ponyfish  www.ponyfish.com

This is a great tool for creating rss feeds from sites that don’t have RSS feeds. Obviuosly if you are using wordpress then you won’t need it (you are distributing your wordpress feeds aren’t you??)  However on some of my sites I’ve added a Html page where I can do comparrision reviews. On these pages I use Ponyfish to create an rss feed and then distribute that.

2. Link Diagnosis  www.linkdiagnosis.com

I love this site, give it a url and it will tell you what back links there are, what anchor text they are using and even which links are no follow/do follow via a nice pie chart. I can’t emphasis just how useful this is if you want to boost your rankings. You can use it on your own site or those of your competitors.

3. Bubbl.  www.bubbl.us I’ve mentioned this before but it really is a great tool so deserves to be mentioned again. Since i’ve started to use Bubbl to track my daily tasks , create plans for sites and track site promotion I have increased the income from the sites i’ve used it on significantly.

4.  Tracking Guru  www.trackingguru.com

This is a great tool to use alongside LinkDiagnosis and Bubbl. It tracks the location of your sites ranking in various search engines for keywords . Allowing you to focus on the poorly performing ones.

For example One of my best performing sites targets 3 keywords  1 is ranked in google at #1 another ranks at #4 and the 3rd ranks at #7.  I can take this information from Tracking Guru, create a plan in Bubble on how to improve the ranking of the 2nd 2 keywords and then monitor the progress of the links and anchor text in Link diagnosis.. And it won’t cost a single penny.

Obviously you can also use it on competitors sites to see how they are ranking for the keywords link diagnosis found (anchor text)

5.  Ok i am going to cheat here I have a few ideas for tools that could go here but I want to hear from you, what are your favorite free tools? Use the comment link below to give me your suggestions and I’ll feature the best tools.