Promotion is a major factor in building a successful website. It is
also one of the most time consuming processes which continually haunt
webmasters.
About two years back, if you were serious about promoting your site, you would have to spend many hours every week submitting your site, by hand, to all the major engines, directories and Free For ALL link pages. The other option was to pay, and the prices were quite high, an 'expert' to do the job for you. The limited options meant that, effectively, only the major companies or the dedicated could afford to have well promoted sites.
A wave of resentment regarding this tedious task soon became evident,
which led to the appearance of many similar CGI scripts all promising
to 'with one click' and only a few minutes of your time, submit your
site details to all the important sites. These services were offered
at a cheaper rate than the other option, and thus the response was
huge.
After a few months though it became evident that things were not quite as straightforward as first imagined. Because of the ever changing nature of the search engines, these static forms could not keep up with engine developments. In other words the CGI scripts had to either updated on a very regular basis, or became obsolete as they would no longer work as expected, resulting in a very poor submission success ratio. Many people quickly caught on that to pay for these services was not worth it, and many companies offering these services either went under or decided to rely on banner advertising revenue and offer the services free of charge.
Another promotion method evolved from these CGI scripts, essentially
the same except that through this method you would fill in your site
details and then individually submit (one click) to all the engines
from a master page. This was more successful because it meant one
script for each engines and thus it was easier to update, as well as
more successful at accomplishing submissions.
This method, although not as fast as the previous 'one click for all'
method, it has the following advantages:
Vastly superior in speed to visiting all the URLs for the various search engines, directories and FFA's and then submitting by hand. - Higher success percentage than the other CGI script method.
As these various CGI scripts evolved or died out, a new promotion tool began to appear on the net. Termed 'Automatic Promotion Software'. These programs went as far as to promise, in some cases, that the could submit your information to as many as 1000 sites. They boasted that they were the fastest and easiest way to promote your site. Were they?
Well no!
These programs had a few major flaws. A lot of the time they were being sold for under $60 which meant that the software publishers could not afford to update the programs on regular basis, another case of out dated submission scripts.
Another major flaw with including FFA pages in the software was that
many of these use subcategories, all different from one another, the
software could not recognize these categories and often posted into
the wrong one, therefore not maximizing traffic.
As you can now no doubt see, each new method of advertising brings
innovative ideas as well as new problems, it would seem that at
present secure way to invest in a successful paid promotion campaign
is still, to hire an 'expert' to promote your site , continuously, on
the basis that if your site is in a good position in the search
engines, the 'expert' gets a commission of your profits.
Alternatively, you could promote your site yourself. A daunting
thought for most, but in fact all the information needed is available
only a few clicks away, on the What Next? Site.
Click Here to Email Bob Smith
