Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Chapter 11. Website Promotion

The best website in the world won’t do you much good if it’s sitting out there all by its lonesome self. For your site to flourish, you need to attract new visitors and then keep them flocking back for more.

You started on this path in the previous chapter. You learned how to get your site noticed in a web search and how to track the number of visitors who stop by. But a search listing, on its own, isn’t enough to grow a brand-new site into a thriving web destination. For that, you need a range of promotional tactics, from sharing links to buying ad space. Contrary to what you might expect, this sort of grassroots promotion might bring more traffic to your site than high-powered search engines like Google.

In this chapter, you’ll learn some of the best techniques for website promotion. You’ll also see how to build a sticky site—one that not only attracts new faces, but also encourages repeat visitors. To pull this off, you need to transform your site into a web community by giving visitors a way to interact with you and with one another. You make that happen using newsletters, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and special-interest social media groups.

Note

The tasks in most of this book—crafting web pages, formatting them with style sheets, uploading your finished site—are relatively straightforward. They might take some time and effort, but when you’re done, you know you’re done. The tasks you’ll tackle in this chapter—promoting your website and building a community ...