By Dennis Francis

Many people set up websites and hold their breath for the thunderous traffic to reach them. After a few weeks of

loneliness, they contact their web designer to find out why no one has visited them. The usual answer is that it takes a while for the search engines to find you and index your pages.

What you never seem to hear is that the web designers are correct and wrong at the same time. The biggest mistake made by people who want to promote their business on the web is to do the promoting last.

If you are going to build a website that people are interested in, start by identifying your audience. a great way to do this is to blog. Setting up a blog takes a fraction of the time it takes to build a website and you can begin adding content immediately.

Blogging is a great free website promotion tool but it’s also a great way to test a market. You can ensure your efforts will not be wasted if you test your content and business model with a blog first.

Let’s say you had a plan for an online flea clothing business. You figure that pet owners who raise fleas will want to give them the best of everything. As a flea owner yourself, you know how happy your fleas are when they are warm and cozy.

Rather than start an online store, first get connected to the market. Create your blog, promote it and work your way up the search engines using article marketing. This will allow you to build readership and provide useful content for your website when you are finished.

If you can build traffic to your blog in a month, you know that you have a viable market. Create a few videos to promote the blog and offer to sign up subscribers to an email list. You can give them exclusive information on flea clothing and flea care before your website is finished.

If you take the effort to build your audience and build your online credibility, you will find it very easy to build traffic to your site once it is completed. You find it easier to increase website traffic and build targeted traffic to your

website once you are able to use blogging as a point man for your web project.

Internet traffic is not easy if you make it the last thing you do in site construction. You will need some measure of website optimization and promotion after you complete your site, but you will find it a whole lot easier if you establish a few blogs first to quickly establish your keyword SEO strategy.

This free website promotion strategy can make the difference between a costly failure and online success.

Let the total in your bank account spur you on to greater enthusiasm. Free web traffic is not really free; it can be costly if not executed consistently

If you followed this post over from Blogging For Noobs, then you know this mornings story.  The summation is I found a potential spamback link in my comments at the Celebrity Rumors and decided to follow it with due diligence before allowing it.  it was a spamback, but it had links to a wealth of good sites worthy of showing you.  Here they are.

While not the most important thing in a theme, the color scheme is certainly the first thing noticed by a visitor to your blog. This handy little color scheme picker will help you come up with an appropriate scheme quickly and easily.

I also found this three part series on usefull css code snippets. Part 1, 2, 3.

This is a nice graphically based use of rounded css corners complete with free graphics and code. The size they give you could easily work as a background image for your blog page.

This Web 2.0 Generator link page had a lot of great links for theme builders as well as just general bloggers.

Sadish Bala had some interesting links and advice of his own on his blog.

Emily Robbins hasn’t updated her blog, How To Blog, in along enough that I consider it abandoned, but that doesn’t stop the old stuff from being worth reading.

Design Disease has some great themes of their own for free.

I also found a really nice site, Web Designer Wall, with some recent articles on using large image backgrounds.

My limited programming knowledge didn’t make the next site very useful to me, but the more I am learning about Wordpress code, Devlounge’s article on how to write a wordpress plugin is where I am going to start reading.