How to Promote a Website: Free and Paid Channels, Priced

How to promote your website: twelve channels, free and paid

Each row is one way to promote a website online. The cost is the one printed on the channel's own page where it prints one; the last column but one is the test that sorts them, because a channel you stop paying or posting to either leaves something up or leaves nothing.

Nine of the twelve start at $0. Paid ads and sponsorships buy attention on a schedule you choose, and the attention ends with the spend. The rows that keep something are the ones where a page exists with your name on it: a listing, a profile, an article, your own pages in search and the list of people who asked to hear from you.

Free website promotion: what each free route asks of you

How to promote a website for free comes down to trading money for hours, and each row charges its hours in a different way. Here is the work behind free website promotion, row by row, counted from our catalog and our guides where they count it.

Directories and launch sites: a form per site, sometimes a badge

Every directory runs its own form, its own limits and its own review. Of the 189 we submit to, 42 put a badge in their rules (32 require one), and 77 pass a followed link on our record without asking for any badge. Some want an account before the form opens: PromoteProject's form has 20 fields, 9 of them required, behind a log-in. A few launch sites keep free lines that run for months, read site by site in our launch checklist.

This is the row that can be handed over whole. Done alone, 30 directories mean 30 forms, 30 descriptions cut to as many sets of limits and a badge to keep up at every site that asks for one. With Submitator you tick them in a dashboard that shows each one's Domain Rating, and the forms, the descriptions and the badges are ours to handle.

Communities: subreddits and the rules they post

Reddit costs nothing to post on, and its platform rules ask the same of everyone in every subreddit: “Participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest, and do not spam or engage in disruptive behaviors (including content manipulation) that interfere with Reddit communities.” Each subreddit posts its own rules on top, and Reddit's page, above its own list, says “Please abide by the rules of communities in which you participate”. Read them before the first post, take part before you link and post the product when people can try it.

For search, a community thread is a conversation more than a link: Hacker News leaves a fresh story nofollow until it earns about twenty points, by our Hacker News count, and Indie Hackers links carry nofollow on our record.

Search, social media and your own list

Search costs pages rather than money: a sitemap in Search Console, then a page for each question a buyer types, which our post on SEO for a young domain lays out. Social media costs regular posts from your own accounts, and every post carries a share card worth checking first in our link preview checker, which shows how a link looks on Google, X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Slack. Your own list costs a signup form and a tool to send from, and the tools have free tiers: Buttondown's pricing says “Absolutely nothing for your first 100 subscribers.”

Website promotion sites: the kinds that list a website

Website promotion sites come in five kinds. Directories file a product by what it does, launch sites rank the day's products, communities discuss them, review sites collect what customers say and newsletters sell a slot in an issue. The first two leave a page with your name on it, so they are the free website promotion sites we count: by group, with the link each one passes on our record.

The whole list, row by row with each badge rule, is our table of startup directories. Which of them are free and which pass a followed link is sorted in our list of directory submission sites; free links beyond directories are in our free backlink sites post, and launch sites judged by their link are on our Product Hunt alternatives page.

Free advertising sites: how to advertise your website for free

The first result Google showed for how to promote a website on 10 November 2026 was Wix's “50 free advertising sites to promote your website online”. Its 50 split into four types: 19 online directories for businesses, 10 social media platforms, 11 bookmarking and curating sites and 10 classified ad websites. The directories are business listings in the Yellow Pages and Better Business Bureau mould. Product Hunt is filed among the bookmarking sites, and it is the one of the 50 in our catalog.

For a shop that list is a plan. For software, the sites that matter file a product by what it does: directories and launch sites, 189 of which are counted above. If your product has a local side (a studio, an agency, a clinic), claim the first entry on Wix's list: Google's own page says “Yes, creating a Business Profile and listing your business on Google is free.”

How to promote a new website: the first four weeks

New website promotion has an order: the page first, then whatever takes days to go live, then whatever runs on a date you choose.

1. Before the first link: the page. Every channel sends people to one URL, so check its title, description and share card, then get a blunt read of the offer, headline and button from our landing page roast, which scores each from 1 to 10 with one fix apiece.
2. Week one: search. Verify the site in Search Console and submit the sitemap, as our post on submitting a website to search engines walks through. How to promote a website on Google past that is pages people search for, planned in our startup SEO post.
3. Weeks one and two: the listings. File the directories and launch sites early, since each runs its own review. When Submitator files them, most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours and every directory within 21 days at most.
4. Weeks two and three: one launch day and the communities. Pick one platform for the day (the run-up, stage by stage, is in our product launch checklist) and post in the communities you already take part in.
5. Weeks three and four: the list and the numbers. Write to everyone who signed up, note signups by the channel that sent them and decide where money goes after that.

Website marketing: visits that stop and pages that stay

Website marketing for a software product runs two kinds of channel side by side: those that send people for as long as you feed them, and those that leave a page someone can find next month. How to market a website on a small budget is mostly the mix: one burst you can repeat (a launch, a thread, an issue), and a stack of pages that grows each week (listings, articles, your own pages in search).

How to drive traffic to your website, and what the traffic leaves behind

How to get traffic to my website is the question under many of these searches, and none of the twelve rows comes with a number of visits attached. A launch day, a front-page thread and a sponsored issue arrive at once and fade; a listing, a ranking page and a list stay where people can reach them. Judge each channel by the signups it sends, noted by source, and keep the ones that send buyers.

Paid website promotion: ads, sponsorships and placements

Paid ads start at whatever you choose to spend. Google's own budget page says “With Google Ads, you decide how much you spend on campaigns and have full control of your ad budget.” The visits last exactly as long as the budget does.

Console and Bytes, two developer newsletters, sell their slots by asking. Console's page says “Email advertise@console.dev to discuss your campaign.” and “Each edition has two advertising slots.”; Bytes asks you to “email sponsor@fireship.dev and we'll get you more information.” One issue goes out, and an archive copy, where the newsletter keeps one, is what remains.

Directories and launch sites sell placements too. Tiny Startups, a launch site we submit to, takes enquiries: “Tell us a bit about your product and we'll send you placement options + pricing.” PromoteProject's feature page offers “Feature Your Startup - 1 Day” at $0.99 and “Feature Your Startup - 1 Week” at $5.99, the week card reading “Get your startup featured in a featured position on our homepage for 7 days with guaranteed visibility.” The listing itself is free, and by the count in our PromoteProject guide (11 October 2026) its profile links the startup twice with no rel attribute: the paid week ends, the free profile stays. Review sites work the same way: G2 says “You can claim your profile for free.” and sells its plans on top, priced in our SaaS marketing post.

Website promotion services sell some of these rows as work done for you; for the directory row, the services and tools are compared on our directory submission tools page. Website promotion software splits the same way: a scheduler posts to social media, an SEO suite reports on search and a submission tool fills directory forms.

Where Submitator fits: the directory row, done for you

Submitator works the top row of the table for you: directories and launch sites. Paid ads and outreach are not part of it. The work starts with a dashboard listing the 189 directories and launch sites we submit to, each with its Domain Rating on screen, where the choosing is yours. A directory is added to that catalog once one of our submissions there has run end to end. Submitator has filed 580+ startups so far.

For each directory we write a description of its own and fill the form on our side, where CAPTCHAs are handled before they could reach you. Badges come from one component on your site that serves whichever badge a directory wants, and every badge stays live on our watch, with no commit per directory. Once a listing is up we push its page through IndexMachine ourselves, the free indexing ($25 value) in Starter, Growth and Scale, with nothing for you to set up; indexing itself stays Google's decision.

As for timing, most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours, and every directory within 21 days at most. If a directory rejects your product, by default you get one more to pick in its place (not on All Directories, where every directory is in your selection already), and a refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase on the conditions in our terms. Pricing is per batch and paid once: $29 buys 30 directories, $49 buys 60, $79 buys 100 and $149 buys All Directories, the whole catalog plus every directory added to it later. Agencies promoting client sites have a white label tier priced per client. PromoteProject's week on its homepage is $5.99; the $29 here files 30 directories, and PromoteProject can be one of them, filed on its free route.