Residual Income Web Blog

This is the fifth and final article in my Make Money with a Website series. The earlier posts were:

How to Make Money with a Website: Niche Topics

How to Make Money with a Website: Building a Site

How to Make Money with a Website: Writing Content

How to Make Money with a Website: Monetizing a Site

Promoting your site is essential in order to bring traffic to your site. Eventually, the goal is to have the majority of your visitors coming through natural search engine traffic, but it takes some effort to get there. In order to add your site to its search results, search engines need to know your site exists and evaluate its content to page ranking.

There are several steps to getting your site noticed and ranked by Google, the king of search engines, as well as Yahoo and the others. Since I prefer to spend time writing and monetizing, I’m pretty brief when it comes to promoting my sites. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Build links to your site
2. Add your website URL to your Google Webmaster account
3. Submit your sitemap to Google.
4. Sprinkle in some social networking.

Backlinks

Backlinks refer to hyperlinks from other sites and blogs pointing to your website, either the main page or any content page on the site. The better quality the link, the more it improves your site’s ranking. Positive factors include age, site quality and relevance. You want the links to your site, ideally, to come from older, well-ranked, relavant sites.

My strategy is to earn money from the very articles that give me backlinks, whenever possible. To that end, I recommend writing articles on the same or related topic as your website and submit them to article directories and content sites, such as Bukisa and HubPages.  In the article or author’s bio, link once to your niche site you are promoting.

Article directories, such as Articles Base and Ezine Articles, make your content available to other web authors, who must leave your bio (with link to your site) intact when reprinting online. This way, you can potentially generate many backlinks quickly.

Since Google gives high importance to quality links, building a few good ones from the start is well worth the effort.

Google Webmaster Tools

Add and verify your site to Google Webmaster Tools, which notifies Google of yor new site and gives you access to tools to help improve your site. It’s simple to do, just enter the URL and click “Add Site” and then follow the instructions to verify yourself as webmaster for the site. While you’re there, check out the other tools and resources for webmasters — I’ve found them very helpful.

Submit your Sitemap

This process is a little more involved when you don’t have a sitemap generator, or a sitemap plugin on a WordPress-powered site, but by following Google’s specific sitemap instructions you shouldn’t have much trouble getting it completed.

Social Networking

Especially in the beginning when your site is young, a little site promotion through social networking can help drive some traffic and generate interest and perhaps natural backlinks to your site. One of the most effective means, especially if you have a Wordpress-powered site and can benefit from other blogs’ plugins such as CommentLuv, is to comment on blogs within your niche or related topics, linking back to your site in the comment form.

Tip: use Twitter to drive readers to your niche site by linking to specific articles with a teasing sentance that will draw interest.

Those are the basics when it comes to site promotion. Keep writing, adding content, and linking to your site from other blogs and content articles to see your site ranked by Google and start receiving your profitable search engine traffic.