Billions of pages on the Internet: that’s your competition. Think about your daily visits; which sites you regularly visit for your news, stock quotes and other information. My guess is that your regular visits can be counted on your fingertips. So how do you, the entrepreneur, help people navigate to the latest addition to the web? The latest and greatest site that everyone should know but no one visits due to poor visibility? There are several key moves you can take to market your new site and attract people to your site before it’s even ready to launch.

• Blog, Blog and More Blog – The first successful move is to create blogs based on as many facets of your business as possible. Keep an inventory in an Excel spreadsheet of your blog locations, usernames, and passwords. It’s important to test a few different blogs and see which ones show up the fastest in the major search engines. Those are the ones you’ll want to focus your efforts on ASAP. Even if you’ve never heard of a blog, it can be regularly crawled and an important addition to your blogging repertoire.
• how, how, how – Another great way to get your name out there is to use a somewhat secret way of linking to your website. A backlink is simply a link on another person’s or company’s website. Do a search for blogs related to your product or service. Visit those blogs and post as many free comments as you can. You can usually add a comment without pre-approving it, it just depends on the popularity of the site or the blogger’s personality. Make sure your comments are relevant to the blog and only include one link per comment. Sometimes a blog will have multiple posts that you can comment on. Usually three comments are enough per blog.
• write, write, write – Articles are an important way to not only add credibility to your own personal talents, but they also add credibility to your website, in addition to the ever-important backlink from a highly tracked source. Write as many articles as you want. Keep them relevant and to around 500 words. This way, people will be more likely to read your article and possibly follow the links you have included, which at least one should be to your website.
• Act bigger than you are The great thing about the internet is that you can be a small startup from the couch of your studio in Fresno, California. This does not mean that your website has to look like this. If you’re not a great designer, find someone who is. If you’re not a great coder, find someone who is. Assemble a team of like-minded people and make your new site look like the Google of your niche. If your site hasn’t launched yet, make sure you have a pre-launch registration page available and possibly a beta tester registration to ensure your code is tight.

These are just some examples. I’m sure you have other ideas of your own, but you’ll want to make sure you’re doing more than just submitting your site to search engines. In today’s internet climate, that is no longer enough.