Congratulations! You’ve completed your very own website. All your products and services are now presented to the online world. You have developed propositions and sales copy to catch your target audience’s attention. So, you have accomplished everything you should do in building up a great company web site.

Or have you?

Promotion is the key to online success. There are free and paid methods that you can utilize to promote your site.

Here are ten guidelines on how to effectively promote your site:

If you have started to promote your site, keep it constant. If you promote your site with persistence, it will catch your audience’s attention. Be patient.
Try and experiment with each promotional method until you determine which works best for you. Free promotion is an option. There will be a process of trial and error until you find what works best.
Make the most of free promotion sites. Search engines and directories can do wonders for you.
Submit articles to http://www.ezinearticles.com using a basic account.
Become a guest blogger on other blog sites.
Join forums and contribute actively. Build your network.
Make valuable comments on others websites and blogs. Trade back links with the website owners if they are open to doing so.
Find free classified advertisements and use those to promote your site.
Place advertisements via CPC or in social media sites.
Join and build great networks in social media sites.

More ideas

Track all visitors, advertisements, and transactions.
See what works best for you.
Analyze if your site is increasing in page rank.
Perfection is impossible – you need to be prepared to always tweak your promotional campaigns.
Try to locate the error, improvement areas and make adjustments to your website and your promotional strategies.
Add more exciting features to your site.
Offer new things for your website visitors.

Site promotion is a strategy which is best done slow and steady. Avoid feast-and-famine attempts at occasional mass promotion – that will only upset your regular readers and flag issues with the search engines which may penalize you. Schedule promotional activity each week and you will be much better off.

In time, your efforts will bear fruit.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Thomas Edison

Well here we are in mid-February and today I happened upon this site by posterous.com researching what people intend to do with their social media tools this year.

Makes for interesting reading.

Seems most folk are separating out their personal and other contacts to share differently with.

Many are being a little more discreet (although not sure that’s universal seeing some of the messages lately!)

Finally, more people intend to dedicate less time to their social media interactions.

Me?

I’m on Twitter, Facebook , Linked in and Foursquare.

The last one I got caught up in early – the competitive side of me wanted those badges and to be in the lead on check0ins. Now I barely touch it so that’s one SM I worry less about now.

I’ve reduced my interaction with LinkedIn – rarely even look at the group messages – it’s become very marketing orienatted and it’s value to me has dissipated but I admit I don;t really have a strategy for it – that may change later this year.

Faceboook I use to keep up with distant family members and that’s about it.

Twitter – that’s random. I have barely twittered lately and yet people still follow me.

So, for me I find I don’t have the time to use Social Media. I do believe it can be a great tool. I just haven’t refined my strategy for using it and my early-adopter random approach has not been useful.

What’s your use of social media like these days?