I guess that, now that you have finished your page, you want to promote it to the world and gain visitors (to make that little counter grow, isn't that true?). First, make sure you have put a lot of effort in doing your page, that it looks good, it does not take so long to load, and it has an attractive theme. Check the Tips and Tricks page to seek for advice on how to improve your site's looks.
Post a message in Usenet, offering help or info at your site. Target newsgroups related to your page's content. Go to DejaNews, you can post from there. You can find there a search engine that displays newsgroups matching the keywords you specify, those are the newsgroups you should post to. Obviously, you MUST have built your page around a theme. If you haven't, it's simple: create one and link your personal page to it. If it's good, people will come and check your personal page for more info on who authored those great pages.
Your second stop should be the GeoCities promote to the world page, there you'll find advice over how to promote your site in the GeoCities community and in the Web. And, you'll want one of those nice things on top of the pages (they're called banners) for sure. They work this way: there's a banner provider named the LinkExchange that, for every 2 hits registered in your site, you gain one exposure of your banner in other sites that participate in the program. There are other bonuses and ways to earn credits (hits). But there's two drawbacks: they take space on your page (usually on top) and you need to get a lot of hits for your page to be shown a lot. Normally, every 35-40 times your banner is presented, it's clicked 1 time (that's called show-to-click ratio). Good banners get as much as 25:1, and poor banners can get 100:1 as a ratio (they really suck, imagine a banner shown 100 times and clicked just once).
You can join a GeoCities exclusive program, GeoRewards, that will put banners of your site in other pages of GeoCities, and you have to set aside a space for others members' banners. Right now, I don't know the link for GeoRewards, so check on the Promote to the world page, there is it.
You can join a Web Ring too. A ring is a group of sites linked by an Image Map (more info on that coming soon) where you can click and navigate the ring as if the sites were all bound together, so if somebody enters a page on your ring, it might be possible for him to navigate and enter your page too. Supposedly a ring is constituted only of sites with the same theme, and a real well-worked info page over any theme can be difficult to achieve. Right now I am a member of the SiliconValley WebRing.
It's cool. I have found cool pages navigating a ring. Usually, Web Ring members get a lot of visitors.
You can talk with people on the Net, so why can't you tell them to visit your site? But be polite, chat with people that really are interested in gathering sites about the particular info you have. Go to the More information page and check for the links on chat rooms.
One last thing: if you have a personal Web page about you, don't even bother to promote it, only real informative sites deserve promotion. But it's OK to chat with people and tell them to visit your site to know you more and what you have written in there. That's the real purpose of a personal Web page. It's called small-scale promotion.
And DON'T use bulk email (spam).
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