How to promote your site, blog, HubPage, Lens

Ever watch a cat chase its tail? That's what the web seems like to me sometimes. One link leads to another. Search any topic and get more links. Click enough links and you'll get back where you started.

Promoting your site is like that. The tail keeps moving! You want to get your site's URL mentioned in lots of places where others are likely to find it and follow that link back to you. Web 2.0 seems, in part, to be about more ways to get links out there: tags, tag clouds, search sites, expert sites, site directories, bookmarking . . . it could make your head hurt thinking about it!

How do you get your URL out there? We are not talking SEO here; we are talking Community Connecting. There are many web services waiting to do this for you, and for free! Don't try just one try them all. The more places your URL is shown, the more chances for a new visitor to find and click to your site.

Create a family of complementary sites. That is, create a web site and a blog and a HubPage(s) and a Lens(s). Cross-link them so that if a visitor finds one of your sites, that visitor can follow your own links to you and your messages. Make them on the same topic or make them on various topics. The key thing is that each of your sites should contain a link to each of your other sites.

Some of the sites are content sites like HubPages where quality content is desired. Others are blurb sites where a short blurb and a link is sufficient. For the article sites the general process is:

• Write about something compatible with the content you want to promote.
  
• Include a link to your relevant content on another site. You can generally only include one or two links to a domain, so you can't promote three hubs on one InfoBarrel page.
• This kind of writing creates your family of articles on your family of sites.
  

To help you build your family of sites I've included sections below with a recommended place to get a free domain name and hosted web site, free blog, free HubPage (like this one) and a free Squidoo Lens.

After you've built your family of sites, use the suggested services below to get your link(s) out there where visitors can find them.

In their words: "StumbleUpon is the best way to discover great websites, videos, photos, blogs and more. Channel surf the internet and get personalized recommendations according to your interests. Keep an online history of your Stumbles, and rate, review and share all the cool things you find."

Checkout StumbleUpon here

[A StumbleUpon Thumbs up for this article would be appreciated - Just click the Share It! button, just above comments.]

Digg is is an article popularity contest. Winning or losing don't matter; it's the hits to your site that count.

In their words - "Digg is a user driven social content website...everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community ... After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see."

Join Digg here. Submit your site as a "story". Get it dug (yeah) or buried (ouch).

[A digg for this article would be appreciated - Just click the Share It! button, just above comments.]

I really like the clean red border on the posts, classy look. RedGage has an active community. The number one activity seems to be posting all your photos and bundling them into collections for others to browse, rate and comment on. Some users post content in RedGage blogs.

Of most interest to article writers is the link feature. Package your article link, a title, a 200 character summary, and tags. The tags can only be one word, so that limits the tag value.

The best thing is the backlink to your article, and the chance to pick up readers from the RedGage community.

Most Hubbers have blogs. Many use these blogs as a place to link to HubPages and other articles. Getting people to notice your blog can be tough.

YouSayToo is a blogging site where you can create a blog, but more important, you can promote your existing blog. It is easy to get your blog listed. The next step is to connect your blog by adding a YouSayToo widget. Then you will host links to other blogs in exchange for other blogs promoting your blog. It's a painless win-win. the blog ads rotate and you get your fair share of impressions on other peoples blogs. So you can get traffic from the bloggers themselves, or from their visitors. You also share revenues via you AdSense and Amazon codes.

Take your Adsense pub code, and your list of HubPages over to SheToldMe. At this site, you write a short blurb about your HubPage, copy in the link to your HUbPage and publish. Presto, another backlink and another web presence for your article.

It's a 1,2,3 process:

1. Sign-up at SheToldMe - Start here, you'll want your Adsense code, and an Email address. You can include a web site URL, so why not use your HubPage profile URL?
2. Wait patiently for them to authorize your account. Might take a couple of days, they are small, and apparently careful.
3. Post your first HubPage link, then another, then another...
   

Xomba is one of the newer sites that invite you to create articles (called Xombytes) or blurbs (called Xomblurbs). Take your choice but be sure to include a link back to a pertinent HubPage to get the back-link and the promotion. Xomblurbs are a cinch to knock out. After spending hours on an article, add five minutes to promote it.

Join Xomba here. Add your Adsense account number (including pub-). You might as well make some coin while you're at it!

Snipsley is a "crowdsourcing website". The idea is that content comes from a crowd or a community. Wit Snipsly, you can write a 3 sentence snippet and add a link to post. Of course, longer and better content works better for you.

Snipsly shares AdSence revenue with you on an 80/20 basis. That's pretty darn good!

Join Snipsly here.

InfoBarrel is a content site, somewhat like HubPages, or Squidoo, but with a lot less formatting pizazz. It's more of an article site. You'll want to create fresh copy for this site. Create an Info Barrel article that relates to one of your HubPage articles (but doesn't duplicate it), and cross link the two articles.

Join InfoBarrel here.

reddit lets you post interesting sites, and rate others. Reddit selects site for you, but its getting your site shown that counts here.

In their words - "register on reddit so that you can: post links to new and interesting sites you find around the web, comment on other people's links, vote for the stories you liked or disliked. (this will affect their ranking and help customize reddit for you.)"

Join Reddit here. Submit your site.

deli.icio.us is a master list of favorites in the community including yours.

In their words - "del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. Use del.icio.us to: Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web. Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues... Anyone can browse del.icio.us and see what others find interesting."

Create an account here. Mark your sites as favorites. Be sure to change settings to show your name and URL with your favorites!

Technorati is the tag central of the Internet.

In their words - "Currently tracking 50.9 million blogs - Technorati is the recognized authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs. We help people search for, surface, and organize bloggers and their daily posts."

Not a HubPages member? Join now -->

This type of expert page is an excellent addition to your family of sites. Its free. It works (you are here now aren't you?).

dmoz is a directory of web sites. Why wouldn't you want to be in a directory of web sites?

In their words - "The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors."

List your site here - 1) Carefully read their page on the listing process.Look here for the process, 2) pick a category for your site 2) submit your URL with title and 25-35 word description. An editor will review your application and get back to you.

In their words: ...the origin of the name came from the very geeky description of what the system does - File URLs. If you can enter a URL and see it in your browser, we can save it for you ... as an added bonus, the definition of "furl" is "to roll up and secure," which is exactly what we do with all the interesting Web pages you find online.

File your URLs at FURL.

In their words: ...Real people with shared interests list the websites they care about. Rate sites you like or save them for later...

Join blinklist here.

Webrings are communities of websites, all with a common theme or interest area and organized into a circular "ring" of mutual links, all tied together by the webring provider. The webring shows at the bottom of your site. Users can click a link from any site in the ring to see another site. If you are in a ring you will pick up browsers from other site traffic.

Join here. Pick a WebRing that matches your site. Apply. Note that you will have to add Java or html code to your site.

If you don't have a blog yet, now is the time to consider it. You can post about your sites and link to your blog from your other sites.

I currently use WordPress. They offer a free blog where they host it for you. You can also use WordPress on your own choice of host for added flexibility.

myLot is a discussion oriented site that can be used to research, debate, vent, chat, etc and get paid based on your activity and content. Seems to be growing by work of mouth. Remember, you heard it here...

Join MyLot here.

Please offer your suggestions on other sites and techniques to increase traffic through community networking. Either add a comment or contact me by Email. If you found this article helpful, please rat it UP and consider clicking on the Share It button below... Thanks.