Launching a Website: Slow and Steady Wins the Race
If you’ve got a really great website with really great content and you haven’t launched the site yet, then this article is for you.
There are a lot of stories floating around the internet (many of them true) about how you can launch a website and start making money from it the next day. Sometimes this is possible, but more often than not, if you are running a small to medium sized site and otherwise have very little footprint around the web, chances are that you won’t be able succeed without risky link building techniques that could damage the perceived reputation of your site and hurt your rankings.
What we recommend is a slow and steady approach to launching a website. It won’t make you quick cash, but it will establish you as an authority on the web, and over time, that can pay huge dividends. Our approach is like the approach of the long term investor. You may not reap immediate rewards, but over the long term you are much more likely to succeed using these methods.
The first key to launching a website is to have at least 50 pages worth of website content (products, articles, etc.) pre-developed and tightly integrated. You’ll want to ensure that all your links work and that there is a way to get to every page from every other page.
At this point, your goal should be to add at least two pages of content/products to your website every week.
Once you’ve uploaded your 50 pages of content, the next key is start promoting your site in ethical ways. We’ve found that the most powerful and ethical way to promote your website for free is by submitting articles to other websites with a link or two back to your own website.
Submitting one article per week to various websites for the first 10 weeks of your website’s existence will pay huge dividends in establishing your site as an authority in its field.
Let’s say you have a site on personal finance. What you’ll want to do is take some time each week to write an article having to do with money, investing, credit cards, debt, college tuition, etc. Then submit those articles to websites like Ezinearticles, GoArticles and ArticleBlast (our preferred three).
By submitting ten articles to each of these sites, you very well may acquire over 50 links back to your website. This makes the search engines take notice of your site.
When launching a website, we feel that this 1 article per week for 10 weeks strategy is the best way to slowly and steadily launch a website. After a while, you should also consider submitting your website to some respectable directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, Best Of the Web and Linkopedia.
In the midst of promoting your site, don’t forget to keep it regularly updated. Adding two pages of unique, relevant content per week go a long way. You could also consider establishing a blog. Blogs let you make short, insightful comments without the requirement that they be too in depth or well structured. The idea is that a blog is a conversation with the world. Keep it conversational, but also keep it moving along. Don’t let it stall for more than a couple days at a time.