Attract more people to your website! Automatically register your URL at ALL the major search engines and indexes for FREE!

Search Engine Register Website Add URL Promote Free

"Tooter," the most sophisticated submission robot on the 'net, stands ready to assist you in promoting your website!

SelfPromotion.com is the net's first and only URL Registration ShareService. Using this site, you can automatically register your website with all the important search engines and indexes, get tips on proper website promotion techniques, improve your HTML, and much more. You will be able to do a better job of promoting your website, and do it faster and more easily as well.

I invite you to use the site for FREE. If you feel the site is useful, then pay me what YOU think it's worth!

The grey navigation palettes on the right side of each page let you quickly bounce around the site. Take your time and browse, the site is full of no-nonsense advice on site promotion and improvement. Start by reading this page to learn the truth about URL registration - the facts that most of the other URL registration services won't tell you!

Then, when you're ready to start promoting your site, use the Create New Account form (just below this text on the right-hand side) to get started registering your site around the Net!

PS: The infamous BaldSpotCam is lower down on this page, as is the link to my "Tips on Getting Listed in Yahoo" page.

Fill in this form to create your account and start promoting your website. Lawyers, the very suspicious, and Bill Gates should read the Terms and Conditions first.

Account Name:

Password:

Your Email Address:

Quite a few people make mistakes when entering their email address. Please check to make sure you haven't mistyped it. And please don't enter an email address that automatically sends a reply when it receives an email; keep in mind that Tooter will send you some emails as it promotes your site, and so your "autoresponder" will send emails back to Tooter, which get bounced to me, and are of no help whatsoever!

How did you find this site?

To give you a taste of how cool the Secret Net Tools are (you have to contribute to get access to all of them), I've enabled your access to two of the simpler ones. Enjoy!

PrettyPrint
Are You Listed?

Special Guest Tool : JotBot Search

Getting Started:
Welcome
Illustrated Tutorial
Comprehensive Help & FAQ
List of Sites
Create New Account

About the Site:
What's New?
How it works
Promotion Monitor
Our Awards
Best User Sites
User Comments

Advice and Commentary:
Preparing your Pages
Getting listed in Yahoo (and the other big indexes)
Goto.com & RealNames
The 500 Sites Fallacy
Page 1 Paranoia
Clickthrough Conundrums
SpamSpamSpam
The Gullibility Virus
Improving your Rankings
How to win Awards
A Marketing Course that Works?!
How to obtain a Merchant Account
Links of Interest
Glossary of Useful Terms
Random Nonsense
Woodhead's Law
What I'm doing about Y2K
SelfPromotion.com Forum

Moral obligations?
Be Supportive!
Add your Award or Index
Make Money Slow! (by linking to me)
Suggestion Box
Advertising & Sponsorship

From 8/17/98 - 11/24/99, 72913 accounts created, of which 7958 supported the site (10.91%)

I run two useful mailing lists that you may wish to consider joining.

SPC-Tips is a low-volume announcement list that keeps you up-to-date with changes on the site and news about website promotion.

SPC-Talk is an unmoderated list where you can post questions and answers about promotion and search-engine topics. It is also available in daily-digest form.

Use this form to subscribe and unsubscribe from the mailing lists.

The Problem of Proper Promotion:

There are many search engines and indexes on the web, containing listings of millions of websites. When people want to find a website, they visit these sites (such as Yahoo, Excite, etc.) and do a search. If you want people to find your site, you need to get listed on all the major indexes.

This site was originally created because I got repeatedly spammed by some scam artists who promised they'd "register my URL at the top 500 search engines." The truth is that there aren't anywhere near 500 search engines. There are in fact about a dozen major english-language search engines that are of any value in generating hits for your site. There are also about 200 general and special-purpose indexes that are useful. The vast majority of the "search engines" the hype-artists will "promote" your site to are Free-For-All links pages that are at best worthless for generating site traffic, and at worst will get your email address on multiple spam lists. Not the kind of promotion you had in mind, eh?

So, having been quite annoyed, and given that there is nothing more dangerous than an annoyed hacker (in the original, honorable meaning of the word), I decided to build a site that would let everyone properly register their URL to all the important search engines and indexes.

What SelfPromotion.com does:

Each index and search engine has an "Add URL" page that lets you enter information about your site into their database. The problem is, of course, that if it takes 10 minutes to find and fill out the information on one of these pages, and you need to register with 60 sites, that's 10 hours -- 10 very boring hours -- of typing! And since most of the sites want the same information (name, email address, URL of your site, etc), you'll spend those 10 hours typing the same things over and over again!

SelfPromotion.com automates this process. You decide what sites you want to register with, and the site will generate a custom form that asks for exactly the information needed to register with those sites. You fill out this single form. Then "Tooter," the tireless submission daemon goes around the net and does all the typing for you. Tooter also saves all the information you entered -- if you come back again to promote to some more sites, it can fill out most of the form for you -- saving you a huge amount of time!

This automatic data entry is one of SelfPromotion.com's most powerful and subtle features. There are many minor indexes out there that might only generate 5 or 10 hits a year for you. It isn't worth spending 5-10 minutes at each of these sites to register by hand, but because the extra information you have to enter to promote to one more site using SelfPromotion.com usually takes you less than a minute to enter, it makes it possible for you to register at more sites than you otherwise would if you were doing it by hand.

It wouldn't be cost-effective for you to spend an extra hour or two of your time doing registrations that might get you an extra 100 visitors a year (and maybe 1 or 2 sales). But if it only took you 10 minutes, it's a different story. Which is the real power of this site. It saves you time.

Furthermore, the site contains a series of articles that will give you all the background information you need to know about site promotion. In particular, there are two crucial articles that you absolutely must read, that teach you how to prepare your site for submission to the search engines (so you get good rankings!), and how to apply for an optimal Yahoo listing (as well as good listings on the other major indexes).

Why are these articles crucial? Because getting into the search engines is a waste of time if you don't rank highly for queries that are important to you. Most people not only don't set up their pages to be search-engine friendly, but waste their time targeting the wrong keywords! Similarly, people are always complaining about how tough it is to get into Yahoo, and that's nonsense. It's easy to get into Yahoo if you have a decent site and you apply correctly. Furthermore, if you learn how to optimize your Yahoo listing, you can easily double the clickthroughs you get from them.

This site really has a dual purpose; to teach you the basic techniques you need to know to effectively promote your site, and to provide you with a power tool that makes the job easier to do. I like to think of site promotion as similar to nailing together a house; my goal is to teach you what nails to use, where you need to nail them, and give you a handy pneumatic nail-gun that will let you go thwack-thwack-thwack and get the job done quickly.

Here's what some of my users (none of whom are my friends or relatives!) have to say about the site:

I have been trying for months to get listed on Yahoo, I tried your method, and I got listed in 2 days!!! -- Jill Annette Johnson Kiser I have been online for years and this is probably the most functional, useful and well designed site I have ever found. It's a blessing for registering a lot of similar pages quickly. -- Sophia Cornet

Great job on this site! It works great for original and re-submissions, and delivers more accurate results than many other so-called "promotion" companies. -- Jonathan Pajion

You should really be impressed you're getting money out of me. I NEVER pay for ANYTHING, but I am THAT impressed with your site. Keep up the good work. Or I'll kill you. -- Jim P Reardon (aka eviljim)

and my current favorite, which proves my mother was right about guilt being good for you:

I know I don't have to contribute again, but your site has saved me so much time and effort that I feel guilty not giving you more money. -- Paige Louise Young

You can read more embarrassingly nice things about the site here.

Manual or Automatic Registration?

Some people will tell you that manually submitting your site is the only way to go (and offer to do it for you for a fee). While it's true that some sites should only be promoted to in person (in particular, Yahoo; read my tips on submitting to Yahoo for all the secrets of doing it right), the automatic submissions done by SelfPromotion.com are absolutely as good as manual promotion. For example, some sites only let you have a 10 word description, while others allow 20 or more words. In such a case, you might be asked for two descriptions, so Tooter can give each site what it wants.

Why SelfPromotion.com is a better solution:

It's Easy! You enter your information only once. All the information you enter is stored, so you never have to type the same information twice!

It's Comprehensive! Tooter knows how to talk to all the important sites (about 100 indexes and 190 awards so far!), and the list of sites is growing steadily.

It's Economical! You can use SelfPromotion.com for FREE! If you like what the site does, then, and only then, help to pay for it by making a contribution. You can "try before you buy," and pay me what you think this service is worth. SelfPromotion.com is a "ShareService™."

It's Faster! Expect to spend a minute or so entering the information for each site you promote to. The more sites you promote to, the more efficient it is, because more and more of your information can be reused. Most of the time will be spent choosing the right categories for each promotion, as each site categorizes the universe differently. Of course, if you return in a few weeks and do some more promoting, it will only take a few minutes, as you'll already have entered most of the information required.

If you are using Navigator 4.x or Explorer 4.x, the data entry form can be seriously JavaScript enhanced, and is even easier to fill out. The Category Autoset feature has to be seen to be believed! It can cut your data-entry time in half by automatically setting categories for you.

It's Different! Other promotion services promote your site to a few search engines and indexes for free as a teaser, then ask you to pay $50, $100 or even more to have them submit to "the top 500 search engines and indexes." Even assuming that they actually have a good list of special-purpose indexes, and aren't submitting your site to a bunch of useless Free-For-All links pages, of those 500 sites, perhaps 50 are appropriate for any particular promotion and will actually generate hits for you. The truth, which most people won't tell you, is that the top 10 sites on the net (places like Yahoo, Excite, AltaVista, etc.), will probably generate 90% of the hits you'll get! (No kidding, check out the research I did on this).

And by the way, here at SelfPromotion.com, if you have more than one website, you can promote them all (well, up to 10 of them per account), as often as you want, at no extra charge.

Supporters get extra goodies!

Contribute $10 or more and you'll get priority service (your promotions get done first) and the ability to automatically apply for hundreds of awards. I'll also store your data for a year (if you don't pay, your data gets deleted after 4 weeks) Finally, you'll gain access to a suite of "Secret Net Tools" that let you:

Track your Search Engine Rankings
Spy on other people's pages and find out why they rank high
Diffuse your Keywords around your site, improving your Search Engine rankings
Find out what pages have linked to yours
Prettyprint your HTML and find coding errors
Quickly submit multiple URLs to all the search engines

People can use the site for Free?! Are you Nuts?

My mom says yes. My wife says it doesn't matter, she loves me anyway. My 6-year-old says it depends on how many toys I buy him, and my 4-year-old is reserving judgment at this time. The bottom line is, I'm trusting that you'll make a contribution to support the service once you see how useful it is. And because the last thing I want is a dissatisfied user, I offer an absolute 100% money-back guarantee. If at any time you feel you haven't gotten your money's worth, you get it back. All you have to do is tell me what the problem was, so I can fix it!

Myths about Registration:

Many people expect to instantly get a lot more hits after registering their site. This will not happen, and anyone who promises such results is what James (my 6 year-old) colorfully refers to as a "silly peanut-butter" (in other words, a liar).

Registering your site will get you more hits, but it will take weeks or months for the increased traffic to become noticeable. After you register your site with a particular index, it can take anything from 5 seconds to 5 months for them to actually list you, if in fact they actually do. Registering at a particular index doesn't guarantee that you'll actually be listed; many indexes are very selective and only list a small percentage of the submissions they get. Furthermore, just because you are listed by a particular site doesn't mean that your listing will appear on any particular search. Even if you're selling something obscure, like, say, Polish Sausage, a search on AltaVista finds over 1600 webpages, only 10 of which get on the coveted "first page." So registration by itself isn't enough; you have to have web-pages that "rank highly" with the search engines. I've already mentioned my page on this topic, and there are also tons of great sites out there that can help you learn how to improve your rankings; I particularly recommend Search Engine Watch as a good place to learn about how search engines work.

Finally, while registering your site (and getting good rankings on the search engines) is an important part of site promotion, it is important to understand that it is only one part of the process; there are other equally important things you should do (read The 500 Sites Fallacy for more thoughts on that subject).

About Your Host:

My name is Robert Woodhead, and back in the early days of the PC era (1981), I was one of the creators of the Wizardry series of computer-roleplaying games. I also created the Macintosh anti-virus tool "Virex." When not pretending to work on this website, I allegedly run AnimEigo, one of the first Japanese Animation companies. Recently, there have been unconfirmed reports that I've been subtitling cool Samurai Films as well. I live in Wilmington, NC, with my beautiful and brilliant wife Natsumi, and my two toy-loving children, James and Alexander. To the right is a semi-live feed from my office (it only updates when you replot the page). If I appear to be tearing out what little hair I have left (the office nickname for the cam is the "BaldSpotCam"), it's probably because someone just emailed me asking why the site doesn't work when used in Japanese on the Lithuanian version of Netscape.

You can also have my server speak to me! Please try to be creative with your insults! Remember, if you can't see me on the webcam, you're basically talking to yourself, and since the messages are spoken, asking me long questions and asking for an email reply is somewhat futile! Asking me to smile, wave, dance, or otherwise make a fool of myself for your amusement will only be granted if you've actually made a contribution, and usually not then!

Still Reading?

Assuming I haven't bored you too much, scroll back up to the top of the page and use the Create New Account form to get started promoting your website! Oh, and if you were looking for the link to the Yahoo tips page, here's an extra copy of it.

This site was developed on a Macintosh, programmed in WebSiphon, and served by WebStar. The author, on those exceedingly rare occasions when he does think, indeed thinks differently.

It looks (and works) better when you use version 4.0 or better of Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, but can be used with any tables-capable browser.

SelfPromotion.com ©1997-1999 Robert Woodhead, All Rights Reserved. SelfPromotion.com™, Tooter™, Secret Net Tools™, MultiSubmitter™, Rankulator™, BaldSpotCam™, and ShareService™ are trademarks of Robert Woodhead. To get help, report bugs, or make suggestions, go here.