There are a lot of websites out there that talk about how to promote a website for free, generally from people who then want to try and sell you a product or service to increase traffic to your site. I thought I'd write an article about my experiences in promoting our website http://www.engcom.net

The site has now been up and running for almost 3 months, and we are still a long ways from experiencing the huge traffic that we're hoping for but traffic is increasing and we're learning a lot as we go. Some of which I hope to tell you about today.

First off, lets go through some numbers to get an idea of what we're talking about.
- Time site has been running: almost 3 months
- Visitors we would like: about 1 million per month
- Approximate growth per month: a little over 50%
- Estimate of time required to hit that target: 12 months

We've hit promotion from several angles.
1. Getting into search engines - I won't discuss this in detail as there are already many pages that do a very good job.

2. Organise your site to encourage people to explore and keep coming back. If you have a look at our home page (http://www.engcom.net), you'll notice that we have a poll, a question of the day and also a quote at the bottom. These are nice little side items that update regularly and are hopefully of general interest. We also have a panel showing the most popular articles and other random/related articles to grab the interest of the visitor. This is important as it will increase the possibility of promotion via word of mouth, which is a very powerful means of promotion. Think about it, a recommendation from a friend is going to be a lot stronger than a recommendation from some random article or advert (Well I suppose that depends on the friend but that's another story). This is going to be a promotional means that will be weak at first but is well worth the effort because as your number of visitors grow, so too is the power of this means of promotion and it snowballs.

3. Gimmicks - these are great for getting a short term boost to traffic that hopefully will like the site, decide to stay and then become part of item 2. If you have a look at http://www.engcom.net/index.php?option=com_grid&Itemid=59 you can see an example of what I'm talking about. It's not going to keep visitors but curiosity has brought quite a few people to the site and if only a small percentage look around the rest of the site like what they see and keep returning then it's achieved it's purpose.

4. Social networks - there are heaps around and some of the more popular ones such as Digg and Del.ico.us get very large amounts of traffic. Post your content regularly to these. Even if you're only getting a small amount of traffic it's still traffic and assuming your content is good and they like what they see then it will all be converted into work of mouth marketing which is what you want.

So as you can see, our main angle of promotion is word of mouth and everything else is merely a means of feeding that. And word of mouth will work wonders as long as you are offering good content that is useful/interesting to people.

In another post shortly I'll talk about what exactly useful/interesting content is. It's one of those things that seems obvious but is actually quite a complex topic once you start to really look into is.