Promote Your Site
Now that you have your site on the web, the next step to promote it.  There are a variety of ways to draw visitors to your site.

• Print your web address on your business cards, stationary, and other publications.
  
• Inform the Webmaster for your union's national Web site so that you can be added to the list of local unions and affiliates. If your state AFL-CIO has a Web site, they may also have links to union locals in the state.
  
• Add one or more union web rings to your site.  Web Rings are groups of sites with the same or similar intrests.   Through navigation links on a web ring (found most often at the bottom of Member pages), visitors can travel to all or any of the sites in a Ring. They can move through a Ring in either direction, go to the next or previous site, or list the next five sites in the Ring. They can jump to a random site in the Ring, or survey all the sites that make up the Ring.
  

Union Ring
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5202/unionring.html

Firefighters Union Web Ring
http://www.mocklin.com/jpfd-org/webring/ring-union1.htm

IBEW
http://www.ibewwebring.org/html/main.html

NATCA
http://www.natcavoice.org/natcaring/natcaring.htm

(If you know of other web rings that should be listed here, please let me know)

• Publicize your Web site to the search engines. Each search engine has a slightly different process for submitting a new Web site URL (Uniform Resource Locator -- your Web address). Many companies advertise that they will submit your Web site to hundreds of search engines for a fee. Don't waste your money on them. You only need to submit to the major search engines. These are:
  

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com

Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com

HotBot
http://hotbot.lycos.com/

Go.com
http://infoseek.go.com/

Google
http://www.google.com

Excite
http://www.excite.com

Magellan
http://magellan.excite.com/

Lycos
http://www.lycos.com

Webcrawler
http://www.webcrawler.com

You will also want to publicize your Web site to some of the services that alert viewers to new Web sites. Two good ones are:

What's New Too!
http://www.whatsnewtoo.com/

Internet Scout's Net-happenings
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/caservices/net-hap/index.html

Back To The WebMasters Page for more Web Page Resources

Back To Get Connected - Getting Your Union On The Web