One thing that online t-shirt entrepreneurs (or any entrepreneurs for that matter) do to promote their sites is write articles or post on the message boards of sites that contain their target audience. This is a great way to get some free (at least as far as your valuable time is “free”) advertising by building valuable links to your site. But the sad truth is that there are many t-shirt entrepreneurs who do this to the detriment of their own site ultimately their business.

They will spend hours every day cruising their selected message boards and churning out articles to submit to sites so they can put their links in the bio and signature line.  But what happens is they are building up other people’s sites rather than their own. Think about it. Making 8 posts on message board A, 7 on board B, 3 on board C, 10 on board D and spending 2 hours writing a short article can eat up a good 6 to 8 hours. Especially if you are involved in responding to posts and comments on your articles. If you are doing this every day what are you really doing to make your own site and your own products better?

You can easily wind up adding hundreds of pages of unique content to other people’s sites each year. And what you are really doing is growing their sites, not yours. It may pay off if their site becomes a mega hit garnering a hundred thousand hits or more per day and you are the only person on the site that can do what you do.  But what are the odds of that?  Slim to none.  That I guarantee.

Even if you are on a site that is already popular you are still not going as much for your own site as you are theirs.

So take a deep breath and commit to growing your own site first! Focus on your content and your products and your site. If you have a blog, update that regularly and answer questions there. Then direct people to your site when you answer them somewhere else on the internet. That way the unique content that search engines love is at your site and you benefit from it while still getting the links back to your site.

The important thing to remember is not to work too hard for other people because they will reap the majority of the benefits from that work, not you. Sure, you MIGHT get a small boost from helping their site but you are your own boss, an entrepreneur, not their employee.  Set yourself up as the authority on topic XYZ, not someone else.  Because if you put them in the position of being the expert or the source for goods and services you provide people will go to them first not you.

That means that your competition can exploit that and build a presence on those sites as well.  And odds are that said site probably doesn’t care that much about as they do simply attracting visitors in general.

But when you are the expert, the “source”, you can control your competition’s access to the market.  After all, you probably aren’t going to let them on your site right? Meaning that they have to start from square one in their attempt to garner precious market share and build their own base.

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J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.