Christian Little

People are constantly flocking to webmaster forums asking for ways to promote their website. So here is one massive list giving you several options.

One thing that may be of interest to you – not a single one of these links contains an affiliate link. I didn’t post this list to make money.

Advertising Exchanges

Ad exchanges work exactly as the name describe – you display a banner from the network that rotates frequently. In exchange, your banner gets shown on other websites in the network. Generally you have to start getting clicks on the banner you display before you can get your banner shown, and there can be a fair bit of click fraud in these programs, but it’s free which is always a plus.

1. Advertising IQ
2. Banner Swarm
3. Co-Op Ad Network
4. Entrecard
5. Traffic Swarm

In general I do not recommend using an ad exchange network. Overall I’ve found the quality isn’t that good, but sometimes you can be surprised and something good will come out of it.

Article Submissions aka Bum Marketing

Bum marketing is the name applied to article marketing, which has been done for years but somebody put a basic ebook together a few years ago on it called the Bum Marketing Method and made a killing of this really simple concept. Basically you write an article and distribute it through various syndication networks, each of which will link back to your site in exchange for using your content. It’s a great way to get thousands of back links (not great quality ones, but you get a lot of them), and just about every SEO specialist does some form of article marketing.

6. Article City
7. Articles Base
8. Article Dashboard
9. EzineArticles
10. goArticles
11. iSnare

I highly recommend doing some form of article marketing for any website. Aside from the back links you can get, the articles that get posted can rank fairly well on their own, which can drive some organic traffic to your website. There’s some people out there claiming they get hundreds of visits per day from article links, which I think is possible but it would take a lot of articles to get it to that level.

Advertising Networks

Advertising networks are medium sized companies that have exclusive advertising control over several websites. Some ad networks can be very small, but the popular ones have hundreds (if not thousands) of websites that you can buy advertising from.

12. 24/7 Real Media
13. AdBrite
14. Ad Dynamix
15. Advertising.com
16. Azoogle Ads
17. Blue Lithium
18. Burst Media
19. Casale Media
20. Collective Media
21. CPX Interactive
22. Feedburner Ads
23. Pulse 360
24. Tribal Fusion

Ad networks are a great place to start if you have a small budget (anywhere from $5 – $100/month), and they can drive a decent amount of traffic if you create the right ad and get it placed on a website that is related to yours. One of the cool things about ad networks is that it’s easy to grow, so as you become more and more successful it’s very little work to expand your ads on any given network, as it’s usually get just setup and entered into their system that is the tricky part.

Now I don’t personally recommend all of these networks, but I have had very positive experience myself from AdBrite, Advertising.com. Additionally, I’ve heard a lot of positive things about Azoogle Ads, Casale Media, and Tribal Fusion.

Classifieds

Classified ads are very easy and almost always free. They work the same way that you see them in newpapers – you can list an advertisement for a product or service for free (pending certain restrictions of course). The most popular is craigslist, which gets millions of visits every month from around the world. If you are selling a product, classified sites should be on your “to-do list”.

25. AdlandPro
26. Craigslist
27. GumTree
28. US Free Ads

Directories (Major)

Getting listed on these directories can get you a big boost in the search engines, so if you have the cash it’s always a good idea to get listed. Unfortunately it’s very expensive and doesn’t usually result in any direct traffic (i.e. Yahoo! charges $300/year). The Open Directory Project is free, but it’s full of corruption so I wouldn’t bother (even though thousands of other directories use their index).

29. Best of the Web
30. Business.com
31. Open Directory
32. Yahoo! Directory

Directory Submissions

If you browse through various webmaster forums like Digital Point, Webmaster World, SEO Chat, and so on you’ll always see people offering directory submission services. And most of these are “hit or miss” services. The only real directory submission service that I can say has worked well for me in the past has been Directory Critic:

33. Directory Critic

Email Marketing

If you are going to get into email marketing, here are some of the most popular platforms to do it from:

34. AWeber
35. DadaMail
36. Exact Target

Overall I would have to recommend Dada Mail as the best program, as you have complete control of it. AWeber has a great system, but they have a lot of rules to make sure you are being an ethical marketer (which is great, but sometimes it can get in the way – for example they don’t allow you to import any email lists, you have to create a list from scratch). Exact Target is the best email marketing platform in the world, but it can cost several thousand dollars per year, so it’s only adviseable if you have a massive list in the first place (at least 10,000 subscribers) and can justify the costs.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

PPC advertising is straight forward – you pay a fee every time somebody clicks on your ad. Here’s the biggest PPC networks that are available:

37. 7search
38. Ask
39. Google Adwords
40. Lyris
41. MIVA
42. MSN adCenter
43. Value Click Media
44. Yahoo! Search Marketing

Generally people always say to use Google Adwords first, but I disagree. If you see a posting I made earlier about trying different PPC networks you’ll understand why.

Press Releases

Press releases are a way of distributing company news and announcements to the public through various news networks. In general, they are expensive (ranging from $100 to $1500 to submit) depending on what features you want in the distribution.

45. PRWeb

PRWeb is THE site to do press releases from. They supply stories to CNN, Google News, Fox News, and every other major news agency in the world. They’re also one of the only reliable distribution companies in the world – you never get screwed with PR Web. In the past I’ve actually had reporters from all over the world contact me about press releases I’ve submitted, so it does have it’s benefits.

Social Networks

A social network is a place where you have an account/profile and you can meet up with friends. For the longest time Myspace was the dominant network, but now Facebook is just creaming them.

46. Facebook
47. LinkedIn
48. MySpace

Don’t expect much from advertising on these networks, but there are other ways like Facebook groups – where you can basically create a network of Facebook people that are interested in the same topic. A group like this can be a powerful marketing tool.

Social Bookmarks

Social bookmarking is a site where people can vote for your site, or just say they like it and spread the love. If you rank highly on a social bookmark site you can expect an enormous amount of traffic (in the case of Digg.com you can get millions of visitors if you get onto the front page).

49. Digg.com
50. Technorati
51. Delicious
52. Reddit
53. Furl

In general I’m not a big fan of social bookmarking, as it’s very fad-based. It’s all about the latest buzz, which makes it not as useful to sites that aren’t on the leading edge of things, but if you are creative enough you can do some fun things with it. My friend Sverre is the Marketing Director for CreStock.com, and they managed to stay on the front page of Digg.com for several weeks at a time due to some very creative marketing tactics they setup.

Miscellaneous Methods

54. Blog Commenting – post comments on related blogs. Most blogs will include a link back to your website (which will probably be nofollow, but if they have traffic some of it might leak over to your site). A great way to find related blogs is to use Google Blogsearch, just enter a keyword and you’ll get hundreds of related blogs on the same topic.
55. Contests – running a contest on your site that gives away prizes is always a great way to promote it. Especially if you ask people to blog about your site to be entered, that works really well and people love the chance to win stuff.
56. Forums – find related forums (simply done by typing in “keyword forum” into Google) and find related forums. Create accounts on the bigger ones and become an active member, after a while create signatures on your posts (don’t spam though!)
57. Squidoo is a hybrid social network that lets you create a lens, or a web page focused on a very specific niche. It’s kind of like wikipedia, but not as formal and more entertaining. Example Lens: Transformers
58. Twitter is a very silly social networking tool. It lets you submit a very brief message about what you are doing to your friends. So you can send out a message saying “I’m sitting on the toilet” and it will get sent out to your friends, either through email, SMS messaging, or instant messenger. I personally think it’s a neat site, but refuse to join it because I know I would do something stupid like “I’m drinking and driving! HAHA!” just to see the response, which would do more harm than good so I avoid it.
59. Yahoo! Answers is another entertaining way to promote your site. People go there to ask questions, and if you provide the best answer it gives you a link back to your website. It can be a good source of organic traffic, but it’s been out for a very long time so chances are most questions have been asked and answered by now, but it’s fun and worth trying.

Syndication

Syndication is getting your website content displayed on other websites, usually through RSS feeds.

60. FeedBurner

FeedBurner takes this a step further and gives you several syndication tools, including a ‘Get My Posts by Email’ function that I use (as do most bloggers). It is very easy to setup, and it’s fully automated so definately worth trying out.

Text Link Advertising

61. Text-Link-Ads

Viral Video Marketing

62. MetaCafe
63. YouTube

Related Blog Posts

1. List of Social Bookmarking Sites
2. List of 300 Classified Websites
3. List of Advertising Networks and Programs