Writing a website is an excellent achievement, but how do you let others know about it? Also, what rewards are in it for you. In this short but simple article we will look at a couple of excellent ways to promote your website and generate some useful pennies.

Search engines don't always generate traffic to your website. Infact, its getting harder and harder these days getting your site listed and ranked higher in some of the most widely used search engines and indexes around. Yahoo is a great way to generate traffic to your website but its really hard to get listed for some strange reason. I have developed websites in the past and yet they still take ages to get listed. For Yahoo, this is well worth remembering. Although it is always a good idea to ensure your website gets on as many search engines as possible.

There are many programs on the market these days which submit your website to hundreds of search engines, but past experience tells, these do not always work. Also there are many websites which also do the submitting for you, but again these are not totally effective. So what can I suggest to help you out?

Well firstly, I really do recommend at looking at atleast 9 of the major ones. i.e

Yahoo
Altavista
Lycos
Excite
MSN
UK Plus
Infoseek
Hotbot
WebCrawler

I have discovered that the best way to get listed on these search engines is to submit your website manually. Its a little tedious, however trust me, you should get better results in doing it this way. If you pop off to some or all of the above websites, you should be able to find a Add a Link button somewhere.

You will want to do this task as often as possible, however I usually do it every 3 months. This is something which in general does seem good enough. You may get better results in doing it every 1 or 2 months. Atleast try it and see how you get on.

Another excellent way to draw traffic to your website is to join the MSN Link Exchange system. Very much like the Workshop site, I have joined this scheme to allow other websites to display my banner. This seems to be an good way to attract new visitors. Some people do not like banners on their site so its down to personal prefference. So how does the MSN Link Exchange work, here is a brief overview.

The LinkExchange Banner Network is an association of web sites that trade banner advertising space on over 400,000 web sites — for free. It is a 2:1 ratio — the amount of free advertising you receive is directly proportional to the amount you give others. So for every 2 banners displayed on your website, you are sure to have yours displayed once somewhere else. The good thing about this system is that you can target your banner displays to be displayed on other sites very much like yours. Also, another good feature to joining this system is that you can monitor how well your banner is doing with a complete administration area. If you are not creative, then dont worry because you dont have to create your own banner.

To find out more, goto: http://www.linkexchange.com

So how do you make money from your website the easy way. Again if you want to do it via using banners on your website you might want to consider joining some schemes which allow you to get paid for people clicking on your banners. A very good website for allowing you to do this is Commission Junction at:

http://www.cj.com

Commission Junction is a very well respected website these days which offer some excellent ways to generate money from your website. With all different kinds of schemes available, I am sure there will be one for you. You can select from all different kinds of banners to display on your website. Some pay more than others, some pay you on commision. My advise would be look deeper into some of the schemes they do. Make sure you also select a scheme which is in the theme of your website. Why display a banner advertising soft toys on a website which has the theme of computing.

Another excellent scheme which could be useful is the Amazon Bookstore website. You get paid for selling books through your website. Although the return is not exactly excellent, it does get your foot in the door. They also now do DVD and Video titles so that might be another area you could explore. You can find Amazon at:

http://www.amazon.co.uk

For international members, make sure you goto Amazon.com.

Thanks for reading this first part in a two part series. I will be back very soon with more schemes to tell you about.