Market Your Websites To Your Competitors'

If you are trying to promote your website, you will have to be smarter than your competition. There are hundreds of ways to build instant short-term traffic, but it is those that control the long-term traffic that are marketing their websites correctly. If you want to market your website and be more efficient than the rest of your industry, you should be getting traffic from these two sources:

1. Search Engines

90% of people use a search engine when trying to find something on the internet. If people hungry for sausages can't find your Italian sausage website, your website isn't serving its purpose. If you want to get some serious traffic, and control your industry, you need to be ranked high up in Google's search results.

In order to this, it will require some optimization. Focus your website around certain keywords, and use techniques to build backlinks to your website for those keywords. If you are friends wit a related webmaster in your niche, have them add a link to your website to raise your PR (PageRank). There are thousands of ways to improve SEO, and it's an essential skill to master if you want to market like a pro.

2. Outside Sources.

The outside sources you get traffic from can be anything from press releases to Myspace comments. An outside source is simply another website sending you traffic, whether you are providing the content or not. There are plenty of sources you can use: articles, forums, blogs, Myspace, Youtube, etc., but it is simply personal preference. If you mix it up, you can get different crowds, and people that will react differently on your website. So get to know which methods work best for you.