Website promotion and strategies for long term success

Satellite Sites

Satellite sites are smaller sites that are about the same or a closely related topic to the one your main site is about. They are a good way to generate more revenue and in the long run all the sites will benefit from each other while you build your own little network. If you, for example, have already established a small readership for your Thailand bike tour website, you could start a website about cheap accommodations or camping grounds, as this is something that probably targets the same kind of reader as your main site.

On the other hand search engines love highly specialized sites and rank them well. In the long run your cheap accommodation website will get some visitors from search engines who were looking for accommodation and some of them will visit your bike tour website as well if you advertise it on your site. This effect of course goes in all sort of directions. The next thing could be to add a website about hiking, backpacking…

This way you build up a network and have a synergy effect with each site benefiting from each other.

Focus on only one site in the beginning and promote it well. It is much easier to promote other sites if you already have a well visited bigger one.

Promoting your site

Here are some ideas that have been great ways of promoting my sites in the past:

  • Invest a bit of money and hold a competition or talk to companies they might sponsor the prizes.
  • Become an active member in relevant forums, contribute good ideas and link to your website whenever it is appropriate. Be careful not to spam forums with your links, people will recognize it. Some forums and online communities also allow you to put a link in your signature. Make use of that.
  • Comment on other blogs with a link back to yours.
  • Write about other blogs if they have something interesting for your readers.
  • Ask other blogs if you can write a guest article. For example ask the webmaster of an outdoor sports blog if you can contribute an article about mountain biking. You can place a footnote in the article making people aware that you also have a dedicated mountain biking blog.
  • Interview renown people in your niche.
  • Create resource lists of all important sites for your topic.
  • Submit your site to important directories in your niche and general blog directories.
  • Exchange a few links with other sites in your niche. Don’t overdo this because it will harm your search rank if you have too many “reciprocal” links. A few (10-20) will benefit your ranking though.
  • Try to find other people who are passionate about your topic to contribute to your site. You can offer them for example their own e-mail addresses to give them some feeling of belonging to your site. Besides that they help you to create content and will probably also tell people about the site.
  • Encourage people to comment. This can be done by posting something controversial from time to time or asking indirect questions in your articles. A healthy discussion on your site will contribute to building up your readership.
  • Get to know other webmasters. They will help you out promoting some articles while you can help them too. Just make sure that both of your websites don’t compete and rather provide additional information about your topic or certain aspects of your topic.
  • Show your personality. It is good if people get to know you over time. Like in real life this can create some sort of relationship that keeps your reader coming back.
  • Write truly useful articles. Online and offline people appreciate if you help them and will either become loyal visitors of your site or even better link to you from their sites.

That’s it for now, but I will keep on updating this guide and if I get some good response to this one here I will release some more addressing specific areas of making money online. I want to keep the guides free but of course they cost me a good amount of time to write so if you have found this guide helpful I would appreciate if you make a donation.