Today’s topic is targeted at website creators and promoters. Although I’ve worked with the design team here at Intrigue at helping build our corporate site, we haven’t fully explored the various options at promoting it. So I decided to do some research and learn some of the techniques needed at telling the world about Intrigue and intriguegraphics.com.

I created this blog as an adjunct to our main site. It’s partially an experiment and partially an indirect way to draw traffic in to our main site. Along the way, I’ve picked up many bits of tid that I get to implement over time. It’s about learning what works and there’s a bit of trial and error – and a whole lot of research to see how other people do this.

After spending a bit of time perusing some web marketing forums, I’ve picked up a few techniques that people can use to help promote their sites and or blogs and to help drive traffic to them.
Also, I have been making the effort to monitor the traffic to the blog and to see what affects it. It’s actually fascinating to observe the changes. While the overall daily traffic is actually low at this point – I’m not yet geared up to devote the time necessary, I’ve seen some interesting things.

Whenever I’ve made a post, usually the following day I’ll notice a few blips of new traffic. It tends to recede the day after and evens out in the days to come.

Recently, I made a couple of posts on a web marketing forum. As a member of the site, I was allowed to put a link into the “signature” area, that appears below the actual post. It seemed like I could put that signature link to good use by dropping in the url for this blog. Most people have various links in their signature, but I want to start small and observe the results.

Amazingly, within a couple of days of my posts, the traffic to my blog jumped! I had about 3 times the normal rate of visitors. Granted, the total number isn’t high, but the EFFECT of the signature link was certainly the cause of the spike. This would be an example of something called a “backlink”.

The point of a “backlink” is to have a direct path between that link and the site you want to point to. In the world of getting your site promoted, accumulating and placing backlinks is an art – and a very important one at that. Designers tend to focus on how good their sites look, but how it performs and is promoted is also exceedingly important. It should NOT be overlooked. Because, even if you have the most elegant website in the world, it won’t matter one bit if not a single person knows it exists. The search engines will find your site if there are several different links pointing to it from other places.

Adding backlinks to forum posts and blogs is a quick and easy way to drive visitors to your site or blog. Although I’m still learning the ropes with this and other techniques, I’ve now personally seen how successful backlinks can be if placed strategically around the ‘net.

A very informative site I found that really delves into the nitty gritty of backlinks can be found here:

http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-create-backlinks

Try this technique and check your website statistics before and after. If done properly, you’ll certainly notice results pretty quickly. As with anything in the business world – if you find something that works for you, repeat it again, and refine the process along the way.