And then things became a little fancier and you could host a form on your site to allow people to send others links to your site. By email.

Plug-ins soon came along, and you could embed content from other sites in your site. And let visitors provide their own content (comments, etc) on your site.

All on your site. Or sent by email.

The great thing these days is that you can easily provide tools to allow visitors to share your content on other sites for you, and to follow your site on other sites. Its about moving the conversation.

Two tools which really illustrate this are Twitter and Add This. I’ve written before about Twitter and how I’ve integrated it into London for Free. I’ve already attracted quite a few followers – people who now don’t need to come back to my site to see info I’ve added about events. Instead, they will see my twitter post on either twitter itself or a twitter content aggregation site.

Add This is an excellent plug-in to allow visitors to London for Free to share it on other sites such as Facebook, delicious and more. And every time they do, it doesn’t just benefit them. It benefits my site. The more times my site can be linked to the likes of Facebook and other popular sites, the better. Though these links aren’t treated as proper inbound links by search engines, they help to advertise my site.

Two simple ways to promote your site on other sites and support conversations by visitors about it anywhere.

Thankfully I’ve so far managed to get the work done to plan – fuelled by chocolate, oranges and beer and driven by listening to excellent internet radio stations late into the evening, 6 nights a week.

And now I’m only one week’s content and three weeks overall from launch.

Here’s the plan at this point:

week 3 from launch: finish final section of content – indoor activities

week 2 from launch: complete research for bridges walk, update remaining content

week 1 from launch: produce sitemap, add new affiliates links, create re-directs from old site

weekend of launch: migrate files to new server, overwriting londonforfree files, generate google sitemap, change hardcoded image links in maps

week after launch: TEST, TEST, TEST

So far, so good. Let’s hope it lasts.