Helping Others Is Its Own Reward
Don't go overboard patting your own back — you know, promoting your home page or blog for the sake of receiving awards from other sites, magazines, societies, or other sources. Post your genealogical site or blog with the intent of helping other genealogists and encouraging a sharing genealogical community. If you use the majority of your page to advertise your awards and beg people to vote for your site in popularity contests, you lose a lot of valuable space where you can post information that's useful to genealogists. And you may lose credibility with your visitors, causing them to turn away — which defeats the purpose of self-promotion in the first place.
Now, we're not saying that you shouldn't acknowledge awards that your site or blog receives if it has good and sound genealogical content. We recognize that it's good business to give a little traffic back to the sites, magazines, societies, or other sources that send visitors your way by awarding your page some honor. We're simply saying that you can acknowledge the honors you receive in a tasteful and humble manner. You don't have to plaster all the graphics for every single award across the top of your page. Rather, you can set up a separate Web page for awards and provide a link from your home page so that those who are interested in seeing your honors can go to that page.
Post a comment