Promoting Your Program
I know you've finished creating your awards program.
You spent ages creating the perfect award image -
everyone agrees it is the best that they have ever seen.
Your criteria are exact and exceptional. Your award is
completely defined and, well, it's perfect.
Now what?
Hey! You need to tell people about it! That's the
whole purpose of awards after all - to get people to
send in their site data. And they cannot do that if you
don't tell them all about it.
The first thing to do is make sure you reference your
awards program from every single page on your web site.
Build it right into your main, top level navigation.
Make it as obvious as you can without detracting from
your design.
I cannot stress this point enough. You are already
(presumably) promoting your web site - so it only makes
sense to be sure your web site promotes your awards
program. Make it very easy to get to the program signup
page so that people will flock to it and literally flood
you with submissions.
Next, make sure you submit your program to all of the
same search engines as you submit your site. Submit the
page separately and on a different day than you submit
your index page.
Now is the time to also make sure you are in the big
index -
http://www.awardsites.com
This is arguably the most important awards index on
the internet. If you are listed here you will get by far
more traffic than any other listing. Awardsites
carefully reviews every single award that gets
submitted, and they are so good at this that they have
earned a prestige and trust that is unparalleled
anywhere.
How do you get listed on Awardsites? Begin by reading
the promotional material on the site. You will find that
awards are separated by subject and grade (higher grades
means better awards programs). Read the criteria and
determine which level you think you would like to be
listed within.
Now, go back to your awards program and compare it to
the criteria with a critical eye. Does your program
measure up? For example, one of the big requirements to
get a better grade is "good criteria". Look at some
award sites listed in the different levels and see what
"good criteria" means. Once you understand, go back and
modify your criteria to measure up. Do this for every
point and you will probably get a higher listing.
Be sure to add your award program to the
Website
Awards Worksheet at
http://www.website-awards.net as soon as you are
finished. You will get some visitors from this
worksheet. It's a good idea to make sure you have gotten
your award listed in Awardsites before you submit to the
worksheet.
There are other places to get your award listed.
Search them out and apply as you see fit. Generally,
I've found these by applying for awards - usually the
banners and buttons for these different programs are
listed on the same page as the awards. Believe me,
though, the amount of traffic you get from ALL of the
other listings will probably be less than a good listing
in Awardsites.
Oh yes, one thing to avoid is those programs which
allow visitors to "automatically" submit to your awards
program without visiting your site. My advice is to
avoid these like the plague. Why? Well, these mean you
will spend quite a bit of time looking at sites, but the
award winners (and losers) will probably never see
yours. That throws out the implicit exchange.
It also means that people who submit have not read
your criteria, which means you will get lots of
worthless submissions that you should never have
received in the first place.
In addition, I've found that by far most of the sites
submitted in this manner do not measure up. In other
words, the amount of effort that the award submission
process requires is so small that the sites are often
not even worth visiting.
Where else do you promote your awards program?
- In your signature line on every email that you
send out.
- As part of every single autoresponder message that
you send. You should be sending an autoresponder
follow-up for every guestbook signing, email form
submission and anything else entered by visitors.
Those autoresponder messages should include a brief
promotion for your awards program.
- Anywhere else that you would promote your website.
If you do these things, you will most likely find
that people will be submitting their sites to your
awards programs in droves.
Additional Information
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