Online Website Promotion

Article Summary: This article briefly explains what website promotion is all about. It looks at key areas to focus your marketing effort, and it discusses the different strategies to promote your online tutoring website - online and off-line.

Your Online Website Promotion Strategy

The only way to get students to use your tutoring service is to be actively involved in website promotion. Website promotion involves asking another popular, subject related website to link to your site. It also involves working on optimizing your web pages, so that when people type in a keyword related to your site, your pages will be more likely to appear in search engine listings.

For example, if your website offers online tutoring to non-English speaking students, and if you already have several links from other popular ESL websites, than two things will likely happen. Firstly, your website will not improve in ranking or importance with the major search engines overnight, but they will gradually improve. And secondly, you will initially get more incoming traffic from these other sites that link to you. As the number of inbound links increase to your site, the search engines will eventually start to notice all those other links pointing to your site. Thus, your search engine ranking will steadily grow, along with the corresponding number of visitors to your website.

Getting relevant inbound links is a time consuming process. Ideally you should aim to ask for 2-3 link exchanges on a daily basis. The easiest way to decide which sites to exchange links with is to type into the search engine, a few specific niche keywords for your field. Simply type up a keyword that you want to get a high ranking for. The search results page will display the top 10 results on the first page, the next top 10 keywords in the following pages and so on. For example, you can find relevant keywords for online tutoring services by typing up "online tutoring service" or "online tutor". For more specific subject-related results: "online math tutor" or "math tutor" - these are all good keywords to search for the top 10 math tutoring website service that you should be exchanging links with. From the search results, visit the top ten sites listed and ask the webmaster if you can exchange links. You might not get any responses at first, but continue to ask for links. You will find that as more and more sites link back to your own site, the sites that previously ignored your offer may warm up to exchanging links with you.

Keys to Successful Website Promotion

According to David Notestine's "Common Sense Web Marketing E-book", there are three areas that webmasters need to focus on to successfully promote their website business:

Useful Content - 34% of your time and energy
Experts suggest that you will need to get web visitors to visit your website at least 8 times before they will buy your product or sign up for your service. Try to add variety to your website, such as games, resources and useful information in order to attract repeat visitors.
Quality Links - 33% of your time and energy
Don't always rely on search engines to bring in visitors, but hook up with sites that are similar in subject and content to yours. For example, if your website provides information on language tutoring, try to exchange links with another website that provides language tutoring.
Networking - 33% of your time and energy
Making your business grow is a combination of hard work, networking and luck. When you start to exchange links with other site owners, you will begin to communicate with real people. You will also become more aware of business opportunities and needs. Look for open opportunities and work with others to give your online tutoring service the boost that it needs to propel your service to success.

For more information about website promotion, visit David Notestine's Cyber-Robotics, Inc website the creator of the popular Zeus internet website promotion software. They also offer a 170 page "Common Sense Web Marketing" eBook which you can download for free. Another good source of website promotion information is Web CEO's University site. Web CEO offers a free software for website promotion, and an excellent free training course that will help you understand search engine optimization and marketing.

Next: Other Ways of Promoting Your Tutoring Service