So you have your website up, but no one is visiting it.  Learning how to promote a website is actually harder than building one.

Over the past few years I have spent countless hours reading and learning about all different ways to promote websites.  I have also learned many valuable lessons that may save you a lot of time and headaches.

The most important lesson about promoting your website is time management.  You want to find promotional ways that offer some long term value.  As mentioned before, so many people who start websites are looking for get-rich-quick schemes.  You will fail and ultimately quit if this is your mind set.

The website promotion methods below offer you the best long term benefits:

• EzineArticles – Without a doubt the best free way to promote your website.
• YouTube – Creating viral videos on YouTube is a great way to get your website noticed.  However, if you are not posting quality videos people can be very harsh with their comments.  So take your time and do your videos right.
• Forum Postings – Posting quality comments to forums related to your niche is an excellent way to receive traffic.
• Blog Comments – Leaving quality comments on relevant blogs is a good way to get noticed in your niche.
• Reciprocal Linking – Trading links with other websites relevant to your niche is a good way to build your credibility.  However, it is very hard for brand new websites to find other popular websites who are willing to trade links.  You will usually have to find other fairly new websites to trade links with when you are first starting out.

The website promotion methods below are alright to use, but offer no long term benefit:

• Craigslist – Is an alright method of website promotion, but there is no long term benefit because it requires you to continually repost your classified ads.  Also, Craigslist is continually trying to stop excessive spam on their website, but this unfortunately also makes it harder and harder to post your ads on their website even if you are not a spammer.
• Backpage – Similar to Craigslist, but just not as widely known.  It is also much easier to post to Backpage without getting your ads flagged than it is with Craigslist.

The website promotion methods below are not worth your time or efforts in my opinion:

• Yahoo Answers – Many webmasters try to use Yahoo Answers to promote their websites.  However, I am here to tell you it requires too much effort, and you will more than likely get your yahoo account suspended if you continually put a link to your website in your answers.  Also Yahoo Answers is filled with a lot of “immature kids, teens, and adults” and it can get quite annoying at times.  Your time can be spent much better elsewhere.
• Social Bookmarking Sites – I am personally not a fan of these sites because I think most of them turn into spam sites for webmasters.