How To Promote Your Site

As I wrote in my last blog posting, what used to work to get visitors to websites no longer does. Any SEO (search engine optimization) is risky nowadays, from submitting to web directories and social bookmarking sites to forum commenting and guest blog postings. Google is always one step ahead of you. Worst case, they will give you a penalty, and traffic will drop to zero. Best case, they will ignore those links.

So I am trying new things. With most people staying home due to COVID-19 pandemic, internet usage is skyrocketing. There is no better time than now to start your own blog or write articles on other sites. Any article you write can subtly promote your business.

Until recently, I had hardly ever written anywhere other than this blog. But for SEO purposes, I decided to branch out. Links on other, bigger sites are much more valuable, plus there are many things I can write about somewhere else that are not the right fit for my blog.

Some of you might already post on LinkedIn.com, and while it is great for promoting your business, based on my research, it has little SEO value, as it is considered a social network like Facebook. Instead, I chose to publish on Medium.com, which is one of the largest article websites. It is not a blog, but people can make comments and follow you. It has very high domain authority (“DA”) and a low spam score, which are the main measurements used to compute the “link juice” (a slang SEO term for how much value the link has).

I figured that my first article (How I Created A Lyrics Generator) would get lost in the vast blogosphere (“articlosphere”?), still, surprisingly it got some claps (the Medium version of likes). It then occurred to me maybe I could get that same article published somewhere even more noticeable instead. I Googled “how to get published on TowardsDataScience.com,” which is a popular site I often go to, and filled out their submission form with a link to my article. They responded by assigning an editor to me, who reviewed what I wrote and gave some really good suggestions for improvement. After I made all the changes she wanted, they published it the next day. The great thing, which I did not realize ahead of time, is that TowardsDataScience.com is part of the Medium.com ecosystem (see this great list of Medium sites you can submit articles to), which means that once the editor approved my article, all I had to do was click a button in my Medium.com account to publish it on TowardsDataScience.com.

During the time I was going back and forth with that editor, I got a message from an editor at a different Medium site that also wanted to publish my article. I was in the middle of writing a response saying I appreciated their offer, but I already promised the article to somebody else, when I had a better idea. I wrote a similar article instead (How I Built An AI Poetry Generator), and they approved it, no edits needed.

Now I was getting cocky, with editors fighting for my stories, so I decided to push the limits like a boozy, cigarette-smoking rebel reporter in those old-time movies. I wrote an article about something I am not really much of an expert on, gave it an audacious title, and released it to my gaggle of knowledge-thirsty fans: How I Made One of the World’s First 100% AI Songs

I was not sure if the response would be a letter on parchment from the Nobel Prize Committee or a bunch of enraged academics with torches knocking down my door. Luckily, it was well-received, and I was spared banishment from the world of publishing.

Here are two more suggestions for promoting your site:

1. Help A Reporter Out – For free, you can sign up for a daily email list of reporters who are looking for people to give them quotes/info for specific stories. Just simply email the reporter with whatever you want to contribute. This is a great way to get links on high-ranking sites. I signed up, emailed a reporter, and got a link from it all within the first week.

2. PodcastGuests.com – Signup for free to get interviewed on podcasts. An interview may or may not give your site a boost, but no matter it will give you a valuable link. This service is run by domainer Andrew Allemann (owner of Domain Name Wire) but covers every industry.

I am trying to change with the times. I refuse to be a dinosaur stomping down the information superhighway, as Millennials zip by in their Teslas yelling “Ok Boomer.” There is money to be made out there, and I am on the hunt for it.