New website and no visitors

You just started a new website and wait for a few hours… then you rush to your statistics panel/visits counter waiting to see at least a few visits but sadly you find that there has only been one visitor… yourself.

Most people read in blogs, newspapers, etc. that there are websites that receive millions of hits every day and it gets you thinking “so my website should at least get some traffic” but it doesn’t matter how much you wait, the traffic graphs don’t seem to change. This is a common mistake, it’s like opening a real mortar and bricks store and hoping to have crowds lining up to enter your newly open store, that just doesn’t happen.

Just as you would in the real world, to get people visiting your website you need to make sure that people know it exists and that it offers something interesting to them.

This time I’m going to share some time-consuming but money-saving tricks to spread the word about your new website.

Tip 1. Include your new URL in every single profile you have. It doesn’t matter if it’s a FaceBook profile, add your URL! From social networking websites to public forums.

Tip 2. Invite all your friends to visit your site and to provide feedback. The most efficient and cheap advertising is word-of-mouth.

Tip 3. Submit your website to search engines yourself. If you look thoroughly you’ll see that all search engines have a “submit a site” or “add a site” link somewhere.

Tip 4. Try to get your website listed in DMOZ.org (a free and open directory), just keep in mind that DMOZ is operated by humans so you need to make sure that your submitting your website to the right category, otherwise it will never be added. You need to be patient, it can take up to a month for your website to be listed in DMOZ.

Tip 5. A lot of forums and webmaster sites have “website showcases” or “show off your website” threads, where webmasters can submit their new websites and other members will visit them and provide feedback.

Tip 6. Whenever you receive feedback, say thank you to the one that provided it and if it makes sense and you update your website based on that feedback, invite the one that provided the feedback to revisit your website and see for himself/herself that you actually appreciated the feedback and applied it to your website.

Tip 7. Create a sitemap.xml (use google, there are tons of online sitemap generators) and upload it to the root of your website, then submit it to Google using Google’s webmaster tools (and also to some other search engines that are sitemap friendly like Yahoo!).

Tip 8. Search for websites with similar interests as yours and ask the webmaster for a link exchange, you’ll place a link to their website if they place a link to yours.

Tip 9. Use your website as part of your email signature and reply to all those emails that you had left unreplied.

Tip 10. Whenever you add a comment on someone else’s blog, enter your URL in the right field, so whenever a visitor of that blog clicks on your username/name he/she will be taken to your website.

Coming soon… now you’ve got traffic, let’s keep it and increase it.