Get Traffic

How to Promote a New Website When Nobody Knows It Exists

Borrow attention before you have an audience of your own. Publish answers to specific questions, participate helpfully in relevant communities, ask suitable partners for mentions and make every shared page useful on its own.

Start with the diagnosis

Traffic becomes useful only when the visitor is relevant and the result can be measured. Start small enough to learn before you scale.

Before changing the page or campaign, separate what you know from what you are assuming. Check the source, the promise, the destination and the desired action in that order. This prevents a visible symptom from being mistaken for the cause.

What to do next

  1. Create three pages addressing real beginner questions.
  2. Choose one community and learn its promotion rules.
  3. Invite a small number of relevant people to give honest feedback.

How to judge the result

Record the source, the page visited and the action that would count as progress. Compare like with like and give the test enough time to reveal a useful pattern. Keep the original version as a reference rather than changing everything at once.

Watch out: Do not confuse indiscriminate link dropping with promotion.

A simple working checklist