About four weeks ago, a couple of my friends from I began filming a funny little internet show and decided to set up a homepage for it. While we are by no means huge, we have grown quite nicely I believe. The episodes are getting better as we hone our skills, our website is getting new content and is updated almost daily, and our traffic is steadily growing. We're even making a little money of advertising.

Now, I am by no means an expert webmaster, I won't make you thousands in ad revenue, and honestly I don't see our show surpassing Homestar Runner anytime soon. I do believe, however, that I've learned some important things about initially setting up your website for success.

1. Set up content rich pages early!
Even before you post anything online fill your pages with content (if possible). Google picked up our site the first week, categorized it, and hasn't change the information since. Other search engines have, but with Google, everything is still using our old keywords, description and all. Getting a lot of content on you site allows Google to categorize your site correctly early on so people can find you, which is of course your goal.

Also, Adsense (Google's ad program) scans your site pretty much the same day as you start posting their ad code, then they don't come back for at least a week (in my experience) so you're stuck with whatever ads they assign you. If you have a lot of content on your page, you will start getting relative ads immediately so you will be ready for all of your new visitors.

2. Showing people the glory that is your website!

I know there are tons of forums and articles out there telling you to do this or that for more visitors, but a lot of them don't know what they're talking about. First of all, the sites that make you go to so many of their sites and in return send some visitors to your site aren't worth the trouble. While you'll occasionally get big traffic increases, the traffic is meaningless. Most likely few, if any will return to your site of their own free will. Second, it takes up your time visiting those pointless sites. Getting on search engines is always nice and posting in forums or wiki's your site is related to does help spread the word to possible views.

There is a one big market though that I haven't read about in any of my research over the past few weeks. Exposure in the real world (not online) can be a huge lift for your site. In our case, the traffic was relatively low, but in the middle of our third week we had an episodes air in our college's film festival. Everyone enjoyed it and ever since we've been getting 20-30 hits from people at our school checking us out. Plus, people linked to us in a couple blogs, told their friends about us, and we've doubled our traffic thanks to that one public viewing.

3. Don't be scared to just ask!

Thousands if not millions of forums exist on the Internet with the sole purpose of discussing web sites. If you have a question, there is a forum for it. Don't be afraid of people telling you your site looks dumb or you don't know what you're doing or that you should burn for all eternity because your banner is the wrong shade of blue. Most of the people that take the time to respond to you are very helpful and knowledgeable. They will point out your sites flaws, but most of them won't make you feel stupid for not knowing everything about websites.

So that's about it. As of right now our sites about to get our 2,000 visitor, which for four weeks time is pretty good I think. I know we most likely won't make it huge with this site, but I think I've learned a thing or two and hopefully something here has helped you out too.

Josh Reed