Word of Mouth Website Promotion

There are many ways to promote a website. Promotion brings traffic, traffic brings potential “sales”. Some promote through Adwords or the like, others via text ads, yet others thru large scale ads on popular sites. All of these methods focus on the “mechanical” as opposed to the “relational”.

The relational methods of promotion will bring more value to a website than the purely mechanical. The mechanical means are necessary for sure, but I am not sure they will bring ultimate long term success. What is a relational means of promotion? Simple, tell PEOPLE. I mean real people. Email your friends about your website. If they respond positively ask them to tell 3-5 of their other friends.

The guys over at Virtual Handshake have an excellent idea that uses mechanical means to find the relational contacts. They use a variety of search engines to find the top influencers in the field they are interested in. Then then contact these people PERSONALLY. They ask them to review their book and hopefully, ideally, write a review. Their hope is that a review from a person of influence in their field will do more for their book then a massive marketing campaign.

Do you listen to the recommendations of those you trust and know? At the least, you will check out whatever it is they have recommended. Trustworthy recommendations via word of mouth can be very powerful.

So what?

Apply this to your website. Spend time developing a website of VALUE (that means stop developing those crappy autogenerated websites that soley try to coax individuals in clicking a link). Find those of reputation and trust in your field to review it for you. A published review on that trusted persons website will go a LONG way in providing traffic and highly interested readers to your site. What more could a webmaster ask for?