Many have said creating a website is the easy part of being an online guru, so what is the hard part? Put simply it is promotion. It is all very fines having the best content and great advert placement but if you don't have the visitors it is all pointless. There is a multitude of ways to get visitors to come to your website and I shall run though just some of them, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

One of the best ways to really start of and get your website flowing with a few visitors is to do link exchanges with other sites that share the same topic as you; this helps as it trades both visitors and page rank. (Page rank is a form of ranking that Google uses to determine where to place your site in listings, the higher the PR the higher up the Google search result you become) It may seem hard at first to find websites which will want you to link exchange with them, and don't try and find the most popular website, they will most likely either blank you or just say no! The best place to find other webmasters willing to do link exchanges is on forums such as DigitalPoint or WebmasterWorld, both being webmaster forums. Always make sure you keep a good relation going with other webmasters, if you break this relation then you will find it hard to form new link exchanges. As you get a higher page rank and more visitors do not push the websites that are doing not as good out of your link exchange, just move them down the list. Another tip is to do some simple programming and automate the process, and you might find some open source software to do this.

Now that you have a few visitors slowly coming to your website you may be unhappy how fast the statistics counter is going, the odd few visitors may sound rubbish but if your content is good they will come back and also give the best form of promotion, word of mouth (WOM as it is known). WOM advertising is one of the hardest to get but it is also one of the most rewarding forms. Think what MySpace.com would be if teenagers did not share their profiles, and tell others to join. A good way to generate word of mouth is to have a simple tell a friend form on your website, this allows for website visitors to email their friends to alert them of your site, and if their friend likes it then they will recommend it to someone else, and the loop goes on and on.

One form of promotion you may not of thought of is using your skills of writing and creating a article about a topic which matches your site, and then posting this article on websites that webmasters visit to get content, you normally have about your site at the bottom of the article and this form both page rank and visitors from people who found your article interesting. One of the main negative points of using this form of advertising is that it takes a lot of effort to create the articles.

You should also submit to directories, a directory is a format of a index which users can use to find other websites, and also is a great way to improve your PR. There is so many directories on the internet that it would not be plausible for me to list them all, however you can get a great list at NameProz Directorys

I hope you found this short but informative article helpful and wish you all the luck when promoting your website, it is no small task but seeing the visitors roll in is extremely rewarding! If you need any more help there is always some great E-Books you can learn from.