1. Plan
With all projects it is a good idea to plan what you’re going to do. Outline the website’s goals - what do you want to achieve with your site. It might be sales, traffic, member registrations or many other things. Then think about how you’re going to achieve these goals, what pages and features your website needs. Sometimes I like to rank this list against how important each one for meeting the goals. You don’t need to spend too long planning, but having a list of features ranked by importance, and an outline of all the pages on your site, can be very handy when it comes to thinking about how to lay out your pages and navigation.

2. Good, User Friendly Design
Having a good looking site is an important factor to me. Something that looks good and is sensible for the target audience, and is considered with user friendliness in mind. I’m not necessarily talking about having lots of fancy graphics - that might not be appropriate. A good start is to look at similar websites to yours (or websites in your niche) and see if there are any similar attributes in the design (colours, layout, images and type of images etc). If there are some similarities there may be a reason for it. A visitor to a website can quickly determine whether a site looks good to them or not, and a website can fall down if it gives the wrong impression.

3. Clean, SEO Friendly Code
When coding your pages, keeping the code clean will help both in loading times and maintenance down the line. Doing some basic SEO will also save headaches later on. Things such as considering what your header tags are on each page, adding titles to links, adding alt tags to images and including keywords in URLs and file names. SEO is a whole beast of its own so I won’t go into lots of detail here.

4. Quality, Relevant Content
Depending on what your site’s purpose is this step will change accordingly, or might not even be relevant. The content of your website is just as important (or even more important in some cases) than the look and feel. People are coming to your website for a reason, and you want to offer them what they’re looking for. Whether it be articles, news, reviews, products or anything else - if it’s not what they’re looking for they will leave. You want to offer the best possible content you can.

5. Regularly Update
Tied in with the last step, you want to keep updating your site regularly. If its articles, publish them regularly. Release new products regularly. Review things regularly. Whatever your site is about, if you can, update it regularly. People like to see that the information they are reading is recent, and that websites they visit are still active. This will make people come back to your site, and more likely to tell others about it. The best way to keep your site updated is to use a content management system.

6. Review
At the end of the process you should have a great looking website that’s churning out quality content regularly. It’s a good idea to review how things are going after a while - is your site achieving the goals you set in step 1? Do you have any new goals now the site is running? From this you can return to step one and plan for the next stage - either adding new features or refining what you already have.

This brand new edition includes most of the great features of Clear Content, including the new additions to come with Version 1.1.

Head over and grab your copy of Clear Content Core now!

Clear Content Version 1.1 brings a couple of new things to our Content Management software, the main being the new Visual Editor.

You can now view your website in “Visual Editor” mode and edit your content right there and then, seeing the results in your page immediately. This new feature brings a higher level of ease of use, and is really easy to set up in your templates and themes!

Secondly the News module has been replaced with a Blog module, so you can now run a blog from your Clear Content website with ease!

Finally we have added a brand new default theme, which looks nicer and shows off all the features better.

On top of this a number of minor bug fixes have been applied that were reported or found by ourselves, which should make things run a lot smoother!

Existing customers can download the new version right now, and we’ve updated our demo for you to have a look around the new features too!

Before I start listing the 10 tips there is one general piece of advice, to do with research really. Before you begin doing any kind of promotion you’ll need to think about what kind of visitors you want to visit your site. Getting people to your site is one thing but if they’re not interested in your site at all then why waste bandwidth on them? Think about where these people are likely to be, and do a bit of searching on google to find these websites. Type in keywords these people might type into google and you’ll find sites they’re likely to be visiting frequently. Make a list of these sites as they’ll come in handy, try and find about 10.

1. Blog Comments
Now it’s time to put your list to use. In your list you should have a few blogs. Head over to these blogs and start reading posts. When you come across a post you have a response or an opinion on, write a comment about their post. The trick here is not to promote your site, the comment should be about their blog post giving your opinions. The reason for this is two fold, firstly if your comment is just promoting your site the blog owner will probably delete the comment thinking it is spam. Secondly, if other visitors to the blog see you commenting regularly and appear to be knowledgeable on the subject, they are more likely to visit your site. Of course, comment forms usually include a website box, which will make your name clickable. So you are still getting your website link in there, but you are giving it more importance and increasing the chance people will actually click it by commenting something meaningful.

Once you’ve done this on the blogs you found in your research, you can try and find similar sites on Google, using your keywords and “blog”. You should also visit all of the blogs regularly, if not daily, commenting regularly. The more links back the better!

2. Forums
Next up go back to your list of sites and you are likely to find some of them are (or have) forums. In a similar way to blogs, you shouldn’t join forums to advertise your site on. What you should do is join up and contribute to the discussions. Read threads and if you have an opinion or response, post up a reply. Even start some topics to get some discussions going. In your control panel you can set a signature, which is attached to all your posts. Pop in a link to your website and your website link will appear on all your posts! Again, the theory behind this is to let people know you know what you’re talking about. If people see you to be knowledgeable on the subject, they will trust you more, and are therefore more likely to visit your website.

Once you’ve done this on the forums you found in your research, you can try and find similar sites on Google, using your keywords and “forum”. You should also visit all of the forums regularly, if not daily, posting regularly. The more links back the better!

3. Articles
Writing articles about your subject can drive a significant amount of traffic to your site, and there are two ways you can do this. You will need to write some quality articles about your niche, articles about things your target audience will want to read.

The first way to use these articles is to have an articles section on your site (or indeed a blog). Put your articles up and use Social Bookmarking (see No.5) sites to drive traffic to them. They will also fill your pages with keywords that will help with your SEO (see No.4).

The second way is to submit articles to article directories, such as ezine articles. To do this the article must not be published elsewhere on the internet. These article directories allow users to publish these articles on their websites, keeping the entire article intact. So all links in your article will appear on many websites around the net! You can also include an “About Me” section with each article, which is where you say a little bit about your website and have a link to it - again this will appear on any website the article is published on.

One trick you can use when submitting to article directories is what is known as “spinning” articles. This is simply rewriting articles so that the content is slightly different. Because the two articles are not identical you can publish one on your website and one on an article directory. A good way to do this is read an article you’ve written, and then attempt to write it again without looking back. You’ll end up with a different article.

4. SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a whole beast of its own. I’ll just put a summary of things you should be doing here, and go into more detail in a future article.

You should be targeting certain keywords (you thought of these during your research). These keywords should appear in your page title (in the browser window), in your meta description, meta keywords, h1 tag, in one <strong> tag, in image alt tags and in your page content a few times. The trick is to include these keywords while still keeping your text humanly readable. Other good places are in your domain name and image file names.

On top of the above, keeping your code clean and fully XHTML/CSS will help a little, while also keeping your site nice and super fast.

Finally incoming links to your site are important too. Put simply, the more people linking to your website, the more important your site is seen to be, and therefore it deserves to be higher in the rankings. Taking Google as an example, each web page has a “Page Rank” between 1 and 10 which determines how important that page is. The more links back you have the higher your Page Rank will be. How important the pages linking to you are is important also. A link from a Page Rank 8 page will be much more beneficial than one from a Page Rank 1 page. A lot of the promotion methods here involve increasing the number of links you have pointing to your site. Things to avoid are just spamming places with your link, and pages that are just full of external links.

5. Social Bookmarking/Networking
Social Bookmarking sites are sites such as Technorati, Digg, Stumble Upon etc. There are lots of them out there, and the idea is based around sharing links with others. Typically the best links receive more kudos from the community, and therefore more traffic is sent your way. When joining these sites it is a good idea to participate in the community before submitting your own links, making a few friends and showing that you are real and not just there to submit your links.

Social Networking sites are sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc. These sites have a community feel about them, and are based around connecting with others. Again joining these sites and being a part of the community is the way to go. Contributing and connecting with people.

6. Directories
Directory submissions can provide you with decent traffic and back links. I would suggest going for the big directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo, along with niche specific directories for more targeted links.

7. PR
Traditional PR and online PR is good for raising your website’s profile and sending some traffic your way. A good press release is key for this, and I would probably recommend getting some advice or even hiring someone to write it for you. A good online PR distribution service is PR Web.

8. Offline Promotion
Even though your website is online, offline promotion shouldn’t be ignored. Business cards, flyers, ads in newspapers and magazines, posters and networking can all help in getting people to your site, especially if your site is localised or for a specific audience.

9. Product Feeds
If you are selling products, product feeds that you can submit to price comparison websites such as Google Products and Shopping.com can send some good leads your way. You probably won’t see masses of traffic, but those who do click through are very likely to buy your products.

10. PPC Advertising
Finally, PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising when used well can give some good results for little investment. Services such as Google Adwords provide you with tools that allow you to narrow down your target market with keywords, set daily budgets and control how much you’re spending. A good tip is to use very specific keywords, as they will be cheaper and more targeted. For example someone looking for black stripy socks will type “black stripy socks” into google. If you’re targeting “socks” as a keyword it is going to be more competitive and cost you more money, and if you don’t sell black stripy socks you’ve wasted that money. If however you do sell pink spotty socks, you can target those keywords, pay less for the clicks and have visitors who are looking for you product exactly.

Hopefully this post has given you a few ideas about how to promote your site!

The article itself is a run down of Content Management Systems currently on the market, featuring some big names and a couple of new faces, one of which Clear Content, plus a couple of screenshots of our clients Rustic Clash and RantPile.

Pick up a copy and take a look!

It has been a long ride, many months of development and months of testing have brought us to this moment. It’s a proud and exciting moment in the office, and we’d like to thank each and every one of our 400+ beta testers for helping out with our beta testing phase.

We are also excited to announce the winners of our Beta Competition - 5 randomly selected testers who submitted a bug during testing have won a Free Single User Licence. They are as follows and will be receiving their Licence Keys over the next couple of days

colum
christopher.oconnell
jdbrewnews
fatbrand
fsakbas

Keep you’re eyes out for our beta test of Clear Ecommerce too - we’ll be getting ready for this over the next few weeks.

As always many thanks to each and every one of you for taking the time to try out our software, you can log into the address below and submit any bugs and suggestions (which we will be eternally grateful for) - and don’t forget our beta competition either! 5 lucky testers will win a Clear Content licence on launch, the more bugs you submit the higher the chance of you winning a copy.

Version 0.0.5 includes major updates to Clear Content, reworking some of the core functionality to streamline things and help make it even easier to use. For this reason, and due to this phase being a beta phase, we recommend downloading the full version from the members area and doing a fresh install.

The key features this release include:

New page manager
We’ve had a rethink on the way Clear Content sites are structured, and have added a “Pages” section to the admin. This new section gives you full control over every page, its information, settings and content. You now assign modules to these pages which gives them the ability to have different kinds of content on them.

Template variable reference
There is now a reference of available template variables when editing your templates too, so you’ll always know what variables are available to you when editing your templates!

Fancier Uploader
Another new feature is a nicer uploader for the image manager. Last release we re-vamped the image manager, now we’ve gone even further and made it nice and fancy using Uploadify.

As always many thanks to each and every one of our beta testers, if you’ve not signed up yet you can do so here. And don’t forget our beta competition either!

We’ve still got a lot of invites to send out so if you’re still waiting please be patient, you’ll get to experience Clear Content soon!

So all that’s left for me to say is a Happy Easter to all and we hope everyone has a great break.

We’re giving away 5 Clear Content licenses to celebrate the release of our software!

Every time you submit a bug or a suggestion as part of our Clear Content beta, you’ll get one entry in the prize draw to win one of the licenses! So the more bugs and suggestions you submit, the more chance you have to win, simple!

If you’re part of the beta already, get over to http://my.allisclear.com to start submitting. If you’re not part of the beta, sign up at http://www.allisclear.com and keep checking your inbox for the beta invite.

Thanks!

The Clear Content team