Launching a new website – Days 21-30

Launching a new website is not as easy as some would have you think. This is the last article in a series of articles that covered the promotional strategies of the first 30 days in the launching of a new website. Time will help any new website get more traffic and this site is so new that it will have to go through some growing pains for the next four months. Patience is needed to develop and get these new sites to a profitable stage.

The last week of the month showed some solid traffic increases. The total visitors for the month was 1018. As a whole, that wasn’t too bad. Next year at this time, it will be interesting to compare the differences.

Using SEO elite, I checked for the number of backlinks and there were 22 backlinks. These backlinks were acquired by writing articles and making comments on other people’s websites.

I checked the main search engines to see how many pages were indexed with each engine. Google has indexed 104 pages. Yahoo has 38 pages. MSN has only one page indexed and I’m not sure how to get more pages indexed by them. I just found a link to submit sites to MSN: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx so now I’ve submitted to that website. Alta Vista reported indexing 38 pages and All The Web has indexed 38 pages.

One strategy that I have added to this site is to add a blog. I think that WordPress blogs are very search engine friendly and I believe that adding content to it on a regular basis will be helpful.

I was able to get some help in making my website comply with the W3C, the web standards organization for all web pages. I have tried in the past to get compliant with that website, but my web skills were not good enough to understand how to change things to get into compliance. A friend of mine from the Philippines told me about a fellow named Taylor S. Ripley. He runs a web development and hosting site at http://www.turkreno.com/. I gave him a call and he was nice enough to walk me through correcting all the mistakes that were on my front page. He also helped me create a more useful sitemap and I have submitted that to the search engines.  He was so knowledgeable and helpful. I highly recommend him as a person to help you with your SEO efforts. It was so nice to meet someone that was so helpful.

So to wrap things up for this 30 Day Plan, I’d like to review the most valuable lessons that I learned during this time period.

1.  When developing a new site, submit a basic sitemap for at least part of your site to Google webmaster tools so you can start getting some traffic.

2.  When your site is completed, submit another sitemap to Google so that they will index all of your pages.

3.  Submit your new site to Yahoo, MSN, All The Web and Alta Vista.

4.  Begin the process of creating a sense of community by visiting other sites that relate to your topic and participate in their conversations on their blogs.

5. Write articles that relate to your product or website and make sure that they get distributed to a large number of directories.

6. Make sure your site is W3 Compliant.

7. Be patient and keep contributing to your site by making it better and offering people more resources and help.

8. Start trying something, anything. Some of what you do will work, and some things won’t. Doing something is better than just dreaming about it.

9. Realize that it takes time for your new project to become profitable and know that it is possible to get your sites profitable enough to support yourself.

10. Network with other people through http://www.meetup.com to find others in your community that are pursuing the same types of business.

I hope that part of this experience has helped you learn what you can do to get your sites started an on to profitability. Good luck with your projects!