Once you have your website up and running, do you just sit and wait for customers to arrive? No! Chances are, they wont even know it exists! How can you let people know? By following these few simple starter steps:

1 Get yourself some business cards. Business cards are a must. Give them out everywhere you go, when you pay bills place one into the envelope, when invoicing clients, do the same or staple one to the paper. If you are unsure about cost, get yourself 100 free colour business cards at places like get100freebusinesscards.com. I've made several orders through them and they are great. This way you can try out their effectiveness without any large financial outlay.

2 Use your email signature. See your email program's help file for instructions on how to enable this. As a general rule, do not go longer than 5 lines in length. It will be annoying and a major turn-off for most people. Include your name, your email address, briefly mention a great offer or service which you are dying to tell everyone about and a web link. An example could be:

 Firstname Lastname
 firstnamelastname@yourdomain.com
 Find information on internet marketing you WONT find anywhere else!
 http://www.yourdomain.com/
 

Something short, simple and to the point like the above will do wonders.

3 Submit your website to search engines. This way, when people go to google and search on a topic related to your business and website, they'll find you! The major search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN and a few others. A good resource for search engine submission can be found at addpro.com.

4 Trade Links. Find webmasters with material and resources complimentary of your own and swap links. This helps build up a community between webmasters and their websites, but also helps search engine ranking! The more people who are linking to you, the more popular and known you become, the higher your search engine ranking!

5 Place Classified Ads. These do work, if they're worded right. How do you do that? I don't have enough room here to explain how to do a simple yet effective classified ad, but they DO work. Place an ad in your local paper, perhaps one in the nation wide paper and a few in strategic online subject-specific places. This will help maximise exposure and will assist in your spreading awareness of your site, both online and off.

And there you have it. Five basic website promotion tips that will help anybody, no matter if you're just starting out or a seasoned webmaster.

Best wishes for your website's success!

Martin Coleman is a freelance writer, computer programmer and computer geek. He runs http://www.computerhelppanel.com, your first and only stop to getting expert advice and answers to your computing questions. He can also be reached at http://www.martincoleman.com.