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Making A Noise On The Net 5 June 2002 Edition
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Million $ Ideas
At last, the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook are revealed for all to see!
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There are people out there charging a small fortune for services that are supposed to get your website "noticed" and increase the flow of traffic to your pages.

Some of these services are good, many of them are really bad.

A couple of weeks ago I promised to update and republish my series on website promotion but I must admit that I got side-tracked, until today.

Starting today, and continuing for the rest of the week, I'll be incremental publishing this information and welcoming feedback from readers.

You'll find the first two instalments here and although it might seem like commonsense stuff, you'd be surprised at just how often it's overlooked.

Other Recent Columns
If you've just discovered Aardvark, check out some of the earlier editions by viewing the archives or by clicking on one of this small selection:

But does all this commonsense and smartness actually work?

Is it really possible to drive lots of traffic to a site simply by using the techniques that will be outlined in this little series?

Well I've applied many (but not all) of these ideas to my pulsejet engine site and it now scores over 10,000 visits to the main page each month (and around 80,000 page views in total) -- not bad for something as esoteric as a site dealing with home-made jet engines.

This site now ranks number one on Google for the search queries: homebuilt jet engine, pulse-jet engine and jet engine kitsets.

But there's a whole lot more to driving traffic than just getting a good search engine ranking.

In the next few days I'll explain how important it is to do thing such as analyse your webserver logs on a daily basis and explain how I've been able to create significant amounts of extra traffic by using the information contained there.

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And, as the title of today's column suggests, I'll give you some tips on how to make a noise that will attract plenty of attention from all corners of the Web.

For example, in the past few days I have received several thousand extra visits as a result of a simple initiative that cost me nothing but a little time but made a lot of noise. It's even attracted the attention of US-based news organisations and requests for interviews by print and broadcast media.

I know for a fact that there are simply far too many good Kiwi websites that are languishing through lack of adequate promotion. They just sit there on the Web, waiting for someone to trip over them rather than banging their own drum and calling people from across the road.

So far I have used my own jet engine site as an example of what can be done with minimal investment of time and effort but I suspect that it might be better to take a completely independent site and use that as an example of "before and after."

With this in mind -- I'm going to do something very silly and ask readers if they would like me to use their site as such an example.

Yes, if you'd like me to put my money where my mouth is and see just how much its traffic can be grown in just a few weeks then drop me a line and I'll try to pick the most interesting or deserving case.

Be aware that you'll have to be willing to honestly disclose your traffic figures before and after I apply myself to the task -- but I won't charge anything and I'm sure everyone will benefit from observing the effects of the techniques I'll be outlining.

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