For weeks you’ve slaved over your new website. You spent time organizing the text, cropping amazing photography, building the perfect graphics and finally it’s time for you new website to go live. A website this good will have traffic beyond your greatest expectations, just as soon as you submit it to the search engines, right? But, after a few days go buy you just aren’t getting the traffic you expected. So you submit it to hundreds of directories. That should do the trick. A few weeks pass and still very few viewers are finding your site. Maybe just submitting your site to search engines and directories just isn’t enough? It’s not. What you need is a well planed strategy to promote you site.

While there are countless was to promote your website, I will outline 5 of them for you to implement.

1) Incentives are a great way to increase web traffic. Offer something for free, either a sample or a report. If you are advertising a product for sale, try giving away a free sample to anyone who visits the site. Offering a free report or free sample is another way for you to send some decent traffic to your website. This tactic is called “moving the free line”. It is when you give the customer something for free, and in return, you incite an action from them, such as visiting your site.

2) Sometimes you just get what you pay for. “Pay per click” marketing is a fast and easy way to drive traffic to your site if you have a budget for online advertising. Almost all of the major search engines offer pay per click services that will send customers that need and want your product or services directly to your website. One of the highlights to this approach is that you often only pay for the “clicks” that land a surfer on your site.

3) Network, network, network! Networking is one of the oldest and most successful tools of business. Focus on building relationships with related businesses, but not direct competitors. The trick is to find businesses that offer similar products and services as your own and share the target audience. Exchanging links with your partners can lead to more conversions for everyone involved. Having unbroken links to quality sites will help improve your search engine rankings. You can also exchange your customer email lists to increase the effectiveness of your email newsletters and direct marketing. This may be the most valuable tip in this article.

4) Remember that content powers the internet. Writing and submitting articles referencing your products and services, and then promoting them to hundreds of websites and directories, will create a powerful flow of lasting traffic to your business. This is called “critical mass” in the web marketing world. The term refers to a state wherein you have your name, site, and product out there in so many different places, you could not stop the referred traffic coming to your website even if you tried.

5) Studies have shown that video is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website. Video has become a mainstay of the internet culture. The more video content you have, the better. Publish videos to your website, and then submit them to free web video sites like Youtube or Google Video. Every time one of your videos is viewed you’ll improve your search engine rankings. Better search engine rankings mean more traffic. Without visitors your website is invisible to the world.