Site promotion is absolutely critical in creating a successful online presence. Without site promotion consider your personal web site or your ecommerce business dead in the water. If you are planning on building a new web site or have a poor performing web site it is extremely important to promote it properly in order to boost visitors and profits. Here are some tips on using site promotion to its fullest.

Site promotion may sound easy in theory but can be much more difficult when applying it to the ecommerce arena. Many people have wasted hundreds or even thousands of dollars advertising their products to the wrong audience or wasting money on promotion tools that show little return on investment. If you are serious about site promotion it is important to do some research and choose the various types of site promotion that will work for your web site.

Many web developers have grand expectations, they figure that if they build a great web site filled with lots of information and great products, thousands of web visitors will land on their web site automatically. This is absolutely not true! The old saying, ?build it and they will come? does not apply to the internet. There are thousands, possibly millions of web sites that are very good quality but get very few visitors each month. If you want to succeed then site promotion is key.

Most people choose the following types of site promotion; paid advertising, reciprocal link exchange, viral marketing, opt in email specials and newsletters, and forum and blog posting.

Most people look to paid advertising as their first source of site promotion. While paid advertising can sharply increase web visitors, it can cost a tremendous amount of money for small budget web sites and your visitors will stop visiting your site once your advertisements stop. However, Google Adwords has made site promotion through paid advertising extremely attractive for small budgeted web developers. Google Adwords allows web developers to spend as low as $.05 per visitor to their web site. For many people this is a great way to attract attention to their web site and products, but for competitive markets, the cost of a visitor can be much more expensive, sometimes $1 - $15 each.

If Google Adwords is not a perfect fit for your site or product, there are plenty of successful web sites that will sell you advertising space on their web site. If you have a niche product that requires a niche audience, pick a web site that can deliver that audience and promote your site by paying for ad space.

Link exchanges are also great for site promotion. Link exchanges work by swapping a link which is your URL in hyper text. Many link exchanges also include with your URL a short synopsis of information about your web site. You can swap your web site links with hundreds or even thousands of different web sites fast and easily. By having your link and short synopsis, you can greatly increase your site promotion and be in front of thousands of eyeballs each month.

Besides reciprocal links you can also increase your site promotion through viral marketing. Viral marketing is a great concept for site promotion. In fact, there are two easy ways to create a viral marketing program for site promotion. Most people create articles that include their link and web site information and then make these articles available for free distribution. There are hundreds of article distribution sites that many web developers use for free content. These web developers that need fresh and original content for their web sites download your article along with the your link and web site information and place it on their web site. With your article distributed to many article distribution sites and downloaded and placed on many web sites, you can increase your exposure 1,000% in a short amount of time.

If articles are not your forte, you can choose to give away a computer code or any item that can posted on other web sites that will bring you a free advertisement and true viral marketing site promotion.

Opt in email is also a great idea for site promotion. If you are paying a lot of money and putting in lots of time to get visitors to your web site, once visitors show up, don't let them slip away so easily. Many web developers request their visitors email addresses so that they can offer them more information about the topics that their visitors are interested in. If you are creating a web site, include a place where your visitors can freely sign up to receive a free weekly or monthly newsletter, a free trial of a product or service that you are offering or notification of specials or coupons for products. Opt in email is great for web developers. A web developer can easily create a long list of emails from visitors that are interested in the web site, products and services that the web developer offers.

Another great idea for site promotion is to post important information about your web site, products or services on web forums and blogs. There are tons of forums that attract many viewers. For instance, if you have a web site that sells gold coins, look for a coin collecting forum or coin collecting blog and post relevant information about the forum topic or blog topic along with your link back to your web site. You will be surprised at how many people will visit your site and check out your products. However, make sure that your information is relevant and not just a link. Many people don't mind you linking to your web site as long as you provide valuable and relevant information.

So remember, do some research and figure out which types of site promotion will take your web site, products and services to the max.