What comes next is really up to you. In order to know
what to do next you need to decide on a few objectives. What do you want
to achieve now? I can only suggest that you might want to:
increase traffic to your site
make some money
help others
get feedback
Increasing
traffic to your site
There is no sure-fire way of increasing the traffic to
your site. But anyway, here are a few methods which might be effective:
-
Join webrings - this way, you are linked to a number of other
sites, which will refer visitors to yours. Other ring members will probably
visit too.
-
Submit your site to search engines - I think all search engines
have a 'submit site' feature, which will be easy to use.
-
Sign people's guestbooks - if you leave the URL of your page,
they will probably visit you - and sign your guestbook (if you have one)
in return.
-
Awards - either giving or recieving, will help increase traffic
to your site.
-
Ask people you know to add links to your site from theirs.
Even ask people you don't know - if they have a similarly-themed site.
-
Make your site interesting - this sounds obvious, but if
people like your site, they will come back to see it again.
-
Update your site - if people know you are regularly updating
and the content will not remain simply static, they may well keep coming
back to see what you've done.
Making money
There are a couple of ways to make money through your
website:
-
If you are really desperate, you could sell advertising space.
-
Another way is to become part of the Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk
associates group. That means you can sell books from your site and get
10% of the purchase price from any book bought through a link from your
site. I don't know if it's a good system or not.
Helping people
If your site is an informative one, you'll want to share
your knowlege and expertise with others. To do this, you can use one or
more of several methods:
-
Join search engines - specify the keywords so that when a
user does a search for help on your subject, yours is the site that comes
up first!
-
Join webrings - when a person does a webring search they
can find your site alongside other similar ones.
-
Join a newsgroup - I don't think you're allowed too much
blatant plugging of your website on newsgroups, but a little can't hurt!
Just find the most suitable groups for your site's theme.
Getting feedback
about your site
Having created your website, you'll want to know what
people think of it. One of the best ways of doing this is to put a guestbook
on your page, so if people want to comment on your site they can create
a guestbook entry. It's also always good to put an e-mail link on your
page. To do this, create a link to mailto:"you@youraddress.com".
If you want to suggest a subject (for example, 'webpage'), add ?SUBJECT=webpage
after the address. Another way of getting feedback about your site might
be through newsgroups (but be careful of spamming).
