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Promoting your fansite When you have worked your ass of to create a good website it would be nice to attract a lot of visitors to it, not? There are several ways to get people come visit your site. First of all, by far the most important method, is to get listed in search engines. There are several search engines out there, Google being the most important, that allow you to submit your website to their search-index. To add your site to Google's Index, follow this link, go here for the Yahoo Add-URL page and point your browser to this page to add your site to MSN Search. There are several other search engines available around the web-landscape, try t9o find them and submit your site. Another way of promoting your fansite is, if you are a member of discussion forum-sites, to place a link to your site in your message board signature. Don't spam message boards with "please visit my site" messages, this might seem to work good, but generally it considered as spamming and it will only get people irritated most of the time, thus having a begtative effect. Still another way is to make your site's webaddress visible into the user-defined message-text on MSN-Messenger, Yahoo-Messenger, ICQ or Google Talk. People will get curious which results in them visiting your site. The fourth and last method I want to mention is to exchange links with other websites, a method which is generally known as “affiliating”. Think of similar fansites, link-lists like Startpagina or even commercial websites like iMDB. When you get to the point where you finally get some people to visit your fansite, your work is just beginning… You don’t want visitors to come to your website once and never again, you want them to keep coming back! Well, how will they come back? This involves a number of factors. Content (like news, stories, pictures or even polls, which is updated regularly, will keep your site very attractive for returning visitors. Using a new design every once in a while shows your users that the site isn’t boring at all! What also works more than fine is to have some sort of interactivity on your site, like a shoutbox, forum or comments-enabled news section (like cutenews). As you have seen, there are a lot of ways to get people to visit your website, and to keep them coming. Good Luck! |
