Bad Ways to Market Your Site
Posted by Mike | Filed under Miscellaneous, Traffic-building
Let’s see now… you want to expose your site, get more visitors and hopefully, earn more money… so you have decided to collect ideas from everyone and do everything that people say just to generate more visitors for your website. You really want to see your traffic stats soar!
There are a lot of strategies to make your number of daily visitors hit the roof, but sad to say, there are some of them which are not really helping you — they just increase the number of your daily hits for a certain period of time (meaning the visitors are not likely to come back). In this post, some ‘bad’ ways to market your site will be tackled. They will be described and I will state the reason why they are not effective ways to get more web traffic. This post is here because I want you to be aware of these marketing strategies and I want to to STAY AWAY from them!
Bad Ways to Market Your Site
Sending massive amounts of e-mails - This has got to be one of the worst strategies to market your site… Let me ask you this question: Have you ever received an e-mail which you didn’t ask for? Was it annoying because it was some sort of solicitation?
Well, if you answered yes, then you should think about sending “visit my site” mails to people you do not even know. Your e-mails will just be marked as spam and your site will be seen as a low-quality site (because you are so desperate that you send spam just to get visitors!).
Sending thousands of bulletins - This is like the first one, only that you’re sending bulletins, not e-mails. People (particularly webmasters) nowadays are fond of sending bulletins to people who use social networking sites just to get some attention and visitors for their websites. They don’t even consider if the people whom they’re sending the messages to are interested; they just press the send button and flood people’s inboxes with spam! Please, don’t do this just to generate traffic! Only send bulletins to people who know you!
Using misleading information - A lot of webmasters (especially when advertising) do this just to get numerous hits — most of them don’t care about the quality of traffic, they just want their counters to hit very high figures! I know that this sounds a little dumb, but apparently, I still encounter misleading ads.
If your site is about coffee, do NOT use the keyword “office” or any other unrelated term when advertising your site. If you are selling construction supplies, do not use the keyword “freebies” just to attract visitors. Also bear in mind that banners which say “You won $1,000″ or something like are also considered misleading. Why? Because they’re giving information which are FALSE. Remember to always use correct information when advertising or marketing your website to avoid conflicts.
Scamming - This one is most probably the worst marketing strategy that one can ever think of. 
Have you encountered sites and/or blogs which ask you the copy a post (with a link to their site) and in return, you’ll have the chance to win [insert a certain sum of money here]? Here’s an example so that everyone can understand it:
This is a blog post… okay? Hey everyone! If you’re fond of visiting [This Site’s Name with a hyperlink], I’ve got this special offer JUST FOR YOU! If you are in need of cash, don’t worry any more because here’s a raffle contest that you can join for free, and the prize is *drumroll* $1,000!
So how does this contest work? Simply copy this post and publish it on your blog so that other people can be aware of this contest too. On [insert date here], I will randomly pick one blog which published this post and the owner will get $1,000! Sounds easy? Get started now!
The idea of the copy-pasting is to get more backlinks and exposure for the site which hosts the contest. After a lot of people have copied and pasted the said post, the owner should pick one winner. However, a lot of people who run this type of contest just forget about the raffle and do not pick a winner to get the said prize.
This is really a bad way to market your site since you are wasting other people’s time and you are making them expect something when they do what you want. Scamming isn’t good, and it will never be good. Never ever use it as a marketing technique.
So… I guess that’s it! Yes, you have just finished reading yet another article from The WWW Observer. Stay tuned for more interesting webmaster-related posts! 
Cyberspace is littered with all sorts of rubbish like these. Glad you took the time out to post about these so webmasters can be aware of these no-nos and not add to the trash out there.