55 Best Ways To Advertise Your Website

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

55 Best Ways To Advertise Your Website

There are lots of great ways to promote your website, but it always helps to have a handy list of topics you can get ideas from. That’s why we’ve compiled this always-growing website promotion tips page. Hopefully it will get you motivated to do one or two small things that you haven’t thought of before to get your site more and more traffic over time.

So, without further ado, here’re a few website promotion tips to give you the ideas you’ll need to increase that all-important traffic.

1. Start an Affiliate Program

I am always amazed at how many businesses go without an affiliate program. Really, it is completely beyond me as to why a business would think that using affiliates would ever be a bad thing. Just think of all the money you spend on advertising, and consider that you pay for ads whether or not anyone responds to them. The difference with affiliates is that you only pay for this kind of ad when you actually get a sale from it. Affiliate ‘advertising’ is quite literally the best advertising you can spend money on for your business. The real reason why most businesses haven’t caught on to the whole affiliate idea yet is not because the idea is flawed, but instead because affiliate technology has traditionally been overcomplicated and difficult to manage. Thankfully, we here at Omnistar realized this a long while back, and created OSI Affiliate as the most user-friendly affiliate software available on the internet. With its powerful features and easy-to-understand interface, it proves itself time and time again. After all, we use it ourselves every single day. Watch this video to see how easy it is to create an affiliate program for your business.

2. Publish An Article

Write a good article in your niche and e-mail bloggers in that niche to let them know. You’ll be surprised at how many may link to you. Just make sure your article is good, or you may get some bad press. (On the other hand, even bad press still ups your pagerank, unless they link with a nofollow tag. But really, who takes the time to do that?)

3. Make a Sig Link

Make sure your signature has a link to your site, whether it’s your email sig, forum sig, or even just a chat profile. (This includes any posts you make in Yahoo! or Google groups.)

4. Post in Newsgroups

Post in Yahoo! or Google groups. Just don’t get addicted to it, or you may never finish going through the rest of these suggestions.

5. Go Web 2.0 with Social Bookmarking Sites

Submit your best pages on major social bookmarking sites like digg and stumbleupon. Just be aware that while social bookmarking sites tend to give high traffic, they usually don’t convert that well, so only submit content that you know is good enough to catch at least a few visitors onto your rss feed.

6. Be Active in the Blogosphere

Comment on blogs! Most bloggers love to see new comments, and if you comment on their blog with a link back to your blog, they’ll be sure to return the favor. (If you’ve got a good eye for which blog topics might support a large audience, you may want to check the upcoming section in digg for blog posts that are about to receive a lot of traffic.)

7. Be In the Blogosphere

That reminds me: start a blog. Having a blog for your site is a great way to train yourself to create new content on a regular basis, and you can later mine your old blog entries for ideas that you can turn into fully-fledged articles for your site. (Just remember not to duplicate your own content!)

8. Be Opinionated

If you notice a blog entry or forum topic where the majority opinion seems to be wrong, be very opinionated on letting them know that you hold an opposite opinion. You may get a few links back saying that you’re wrong. (In fact, why not just hold the opposite opinion every time, even if they’re technically right? In the SEO world, any link back is a good link back.)

9. Answer a Question

Answer some questions in your niche on Yahoo! Answers. Just keep in mind that answering a few questions in depth is much better than giving a lot of single paragraph answers. It’s also best to answer recent questions, since you have a better chance of being voted up that way.

10. Make a Creative 404 Page

Make your 404 page really useful by including links to your most popular content. More than likely the user was looking for this content anyway, and, even if not, they may very well become interested in it by seeing a teaser line when they hit your 404 error page.

11. Tempt Fate with Opt-In Forms

Consider trading links with a company in a similar industry that doesn’t compete with you. Better yet, if you can stomach it, experiment with the idea of trading the creation of a small opt-in form on each of your confirmation pages. That way anytime someone buys from this other company, the purchaser will have the option to sign up for your newsletter, or something else equally innocuous. The drawback being, of course, that you will have to submit your customers into dealing with the dreaded opt-in form on your confirmation page. You might consider minimizing the negative reaction by putting the opt-in form on the very final page, so nothing is lost if the user just closes the window at that point.

12. Review Products

Do a review column in your blog where you review products or companies on a bi-weekly basis. If your review is positive, e-mail the company in question and ask to be featured in their press section. But don’t forget that having nothing but positive reviews is a big turn off for most readers, so mix it up a bit.

13. Publish Articles (part 2)

Compose articles in your niche and submit them to article directories. Just be sure to make the articles you submit top-notch; otherwise you’ll have info dispersed on other sites under your name with no way of correcting any errors in the article. And remember not to duplicate content!

14. Go Public with a Press Release

Write a newsworthy press release and submit it to PRWeb. If it’s genuinely newsworthy, the release may get picked up all over the place.

15. When All Else Fails, Just Pay for Traffic

Use payperclick services (like adwords, adcenter, ysm) to get traffic. But make sure the keywords you sign up for are worth the cost. Just because a keyword costs a lot doesn’t mean it’s a good value—and it similarly doesn’t mean anything if the keyword costs very little. Do a bit of research on which keywords are worthwhile before going the payperclick route. But once you’ve found the right keyword combinations, it can be a good source of supplemental incoming traffic.

16. Start an RSS Feed

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great way to get subscribers to see new content on an ongoing basis. Once you have an RSS feed, subscribing is easy for web visitors, and generally gets a stronger sign up ratio than email subscriptions. Just make sure to advertise your feed in a good place, so it’s easy to subscribe to. (If you’re looking for a good syndication service, try Y! Pipes.)

17. Start a Mailing List

While getting people to signup for an email newsletter is generally more difficult than getting them to subscribe to an RSS feed, the extra difficulty means that when you do get subscribers, they’re generally good targets for conversion. Just keep in mind that email newsletters have specific laws that pertain to them, and noncompliance can land you in deep trouble. Thankfully, if you use Omnistar Mailer for sending your newsletter, we offer a free ebook that details the specifics on how to market with emails the right way: Email Marketing for Beginners.

18. Include a Bookmark-This-Page Link

Reminding your visitors to bookmark your page is a great way to make sure they come back in case they leave prematurely. Of course, if they’re anything like me, then they have a gazillion bookmarked sites—so make sure to make your bookmark stand out with a well written title and a good favicon.

19. Create a Great Favicon

A good favicon image accomplishes so very much: it increases brand awareness, makes your site stand out from the crowd, and gives you that street cred that comes along with every well-made favicon file. Just don’t make it animated gif style—you may think it makes you stand out even more, but users have been known to delete a bookmark or close a tab solely because of an animated favicon. Just don’t do it.

20. Submit Your Site to Internet Directories

Internet Directories are an excellent way to get high quality linkbacks with just a little investment of time. Thankfully, we here at Omnistar recognize this, and so we’ve compiled a list of the best internet directories to be listed in, each sorted by pagerank. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend concentrating on the free ones first.

21. Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories

The great thing about blogs is that you can submit them for links both in site directories AND blog directories. Meaning you get twice the linkbacks! Unfortunately, this also means you’ll have to actually submit them twice as many times as your main site. Believe me when I say that it gets pretty tiring around the thirtieth submission.

22. Advertise on Craigslist

If you haven’t heard of craigslist, then it’s time you got out from behind that rock you’ve been sleeping under since the twentieth century. You can publicize your site on craigslist for free—but it’s only worthwhile if you make your posts interesting enough to go viral. A well written craigslist ad consists of a catchy title, a funny and/or mock-serious body, and a well-keyworded link back to your site. But whatever you do, don’t spam with pointless ads, because you just won’t get a return that’s worth your time.

23. Use a Tell-a-Friend Script

By including a ‘tell-a-friend’ link on your site, every visitor you get will potentially advertise your site to a few of their friends. And then each of those may in turn tell their friends, and so on and so forth. This is actually a pretty powerful tool, especially if you use software that follows up the note with a well designed marketing campaign.

24. Submit Your RSS to Feed Directories

You thought I’d forget about this one, didn’t you? I guess I fooled you by making 21 and 22 on non-directory topics. In fact, now that I’m really thinking about it, number 24 should probably be about just submitting to whatever directory you see, for whatever reason.

25. Submit to Whatever Directory You See, For Whatever Reason

In other words, if you sell widgets, make sure you’re listed in the widgets directory. And also the doodad directory, if you can link doodads to widgets in some believable manner in the short description you provide for your link. Remember: every link is a good link.

26. Teach a Class

No, really. If you possess a higher education degree of any kind, you can probably find a part time position teaching a night class at your local community college. It won’t pay very well, but if you can invest in teaching on night a week, it will really help to get your name out in the local community. Colleges love to have teachers who run real businesses because the fact that you run a business at all is enough to legitimize you as an expert in whatever field you’re in. And since most of your students will be adults working in the business world that are interested in taking the class you’re qualified to teach, you will be making contacts left and right. Plus think of the resume building opportunity—when you’re trying to sell yourself to potential clients, it never hurts for them to conveniently notice that you’ve actually taught classes in the field they want to hire you for. You just can’t lose with this one.

27. Create a Cartoon Mascot

Cartoon mascots can be great when they’re used in an appropriate setting. Cartoons attract all kinds of people (not just kids), and studies have shown that the eye tends to gravitate toward cartoon characters more often than simple logos. Of course, not everyone is agreed that that is a good thing; some people make the point that a residual background logo that doesn’t attract attention is more appropriate for your main website, since you’d really rather have readers checking out your content. But others argue that an eye-catching logo is essential to building brand, and more than makes up for the fact that it takes viewers eyes away from content temporarily. Plus, if your visitor happens to have a kid in the vicinity, the child may prevent the user from clicking away from your page too quickly. Of course, this effect will be minimal, but every bit helps, right?

28. Host a Game w/ Your Mascot

Games drive traffic; that’s just a fact. You can actually get a pretty good game made with minimal investment by holding a contest for people to come up with the best game that includes your cartoon mascot. Just make sure to advertise the contest on a site where gaming programmers visit often, and you should get lots of entrants. Right now, flash turret defense games are all the rage, so you may want to try one of those, if it’s appropriate for your business. Oh, and don’t forget to submit your game to game directory sites when you’re finished.

29. Sell on eBay

Selling on eBay not only gets you an additional avenue to hawk your wares, but also means you get lots of additional incoming links for linkback purposes. Of course, only your profile page will be a permanent page, but if you are able to consistently make sales via eBay as well, then keeping some extra links back to your site from there can also work really well for you. eBay is one of the sites that are spidered by google multiple times each day, so you can always be sure that your links will count toward your pagerank. (Not to mention the whole new audience you’ll reach via eBay!)

30. Use Facebook & MySpace

Creating a MySpace and Facebook account can do good things for your business, but be careful. A badly run MySpace page can be a magnet for people to leave negative feedback, and experience has shown that the creation of a Facebook account is a permanent procedure that you really can’t ever take back. Nevertheless, if you can oversee these accounts to make sure they’re always a positive thing for your site, the linkback as well as traffic generation can be quite useful.

31. Create a Facebook App

While we’re talking about social media sites, I can’t neglect the idea that creating a good facebook application can easily go viral. But I must stress that it MUST be well made. If you can manage it, you might be interested in noticing that you can run the application on your site as well. The best apps do something unique for the user and includes high levels of interactivity.

32. Use Business Cards Aggressively

If you don’t have at least ten business cards in your wallet right this very second then you are seriously lacking in your marketing efforts. But if this is the case, don’t opine; instead, look at it as an opportunity, because you’ll be able to see dramatic returns just from getting well-designed business cards made and passing them out anytime you go anywhere. And I don’t just mean at trade events; if you have a really good card made up, then handing out cards will turn from a chore to a conversation starter. And after all, that’s what you really need from a business card. Just don’t forget to put your website address on them.

33. Cross-Promote Your Pages

The bald advertisement for one of our products in tip #32 serves dual purposes: not just is OSI Affiliate a great way to promote your site, but also you should always remember to promote your sites on other sites you control. Cross-promotion can be very powerful, since most people who visit one part of your site will likely never see the other parts. By making sure that every page you run gives links to other pages that offer content a reader would likely be interested in, you will get high-conversion leads. After all, since they came to the page from another of your pages, they already trust you as a source, plus they’re directly interested in the page that was linked. Think about it: maybe only a small percentage of you actually clicked on the link to our OSI Affiliate. But of those who did, the vast majority probably went on to purchase the software. The moral here is that targeted advertising is important.

34. Purchase Misspelled Domains

If you have a few main competitors in your niche that are doing well, consider purchasing misspellings of their domain name and having it redirect to your site. This does not mean that you should pretend that you are that other company—that would be quite illegal. But it does mean that you’ll get hits from people who can’t quite spell rite. This technique is especially useful if you can grab the ‘.com’ version of a competitor’s ‘.net’ (or other) address. If you want to know which misspellings are the most common, you may want to check out the stats on how many google searches were made for certain misspellings, and use it as the basis for an educated guess on which misspellings were most common in people’s address bars.

35. Review a Book

Or anything else for that matter. A well written Amazon review will be prominently placed on a moderately high pagerank site, and a strategically placed link back to your website can do wonders for you. If you need some ideas on how to write a good review, see what others have done for a bic pen or a gallon of milk.

36. Advertise on Bulletin Board Sites

Find boards where individuals who fit into your target market congregate. These are the perfect place to advertise your site, just make sure you aren't violating the site's spam policies. An especially effective technique is posting discount codes or special offers for the board members to use.

37. Donate time or resources

Charities are a great way to help promote your site, simply provide them with services and they will be able to help you, with a mention in their mailer or a link on their site. This kind of promotion is invaluable.

38. Offer web appliations

Build small web tools for your customers, these applications will keep them coming back to your site. This content can also get you listed on indexes of web apps.

39. Develop mobile applications

The advent of the iPhone and iPod touch have made developing applications for mobile platforms a booming business. You can bring in traffic by making apps specifically for mobile users, guaranteeing that traffic keeps comming back to use your product.

40. Partner with other sites

Synergy in advertising is important, and by partnering with another site to offer your services in tandem, you can gain access to each other's customer base, as well as benefiting from the buzz that comes with a partnership. These special deals can help put your product in front of new customers, virtually the best kind of advertising you can get.

41. Go Viral

Viral marketing is popular for a reason, by comming up with clever ways to get your customers interested in your product you reap the benefit of free advertising. This means participating in contests that drive traffic, giving things away, and usually trying to interact with your customers, allowing them to participate.

42. Think Locally

While the convenience of the web allows you to do business arround the world, your local chamber of commerce and other organizations can help drum up local business for your site. These relationships can be really helpful because it tends to also lead to networking with your peers in the area.

43. Update Regularly

Using blogs and podcasts to drum of traffic only works if customers are subscribing, and that means regular updates. How often? You usually want to shoot for weekly podcasts and daily or as close to daily as possible for blogs. Each post doesn't have to be long, but you need to be providing regular content, as that is what the typical subscriber is looking for.

44. Sell Clever Swag

No matter what your business does, it likely will benefit from selling gear with your logo on it. The number of sites selling articles of clothing and other accessories has multiplied greatly, and you can now easily sell your own gear through their sites, with no work besides designing the logo on your end. Cafepress.com is one such example. By offering products with a clever tag line you can promote your site, make a little money, and benefit from free advertising anywhere that product is worn.

45. Hire a Marketing Specialist

In the end, it sometimes takes a professional to take your site to the next level. As your company grows, marketing becomes more important, so you may want to hire someone with marketing knowhow to work solely on improving traffic, allowing you to improve your content. After all, your site has a lot more to it than just how you get visitors.

46. Publish to News Services

There are a lot of sites that want content without generating it themselves, which means sites like ezinearticles.com can provide you with an avenue to provide your content to other sites and recieve links back in return.

47. Join a trade group

Collaborate with people running sites in the same field, advertise with each other, and network to provide customers with better service. Trade groups provide a great opportunity to improve your site!

48. Offer special deals to your customers

You can get great advertising out of your customers by giving them benefits for bringing in new customers. You can also bring in returning business by offering special discounts.

49. Optimize your site for search engines

Search Engine Optimization or SEO has become one of the quickest and easiest ways to drive traffic to your site. Most web browsers are using search engines to find websites. If you focus on optimizing small things on your site, like using keywords and meta tags properly, you can notice a fast improvement in your rank on sites like Google and Yahoo!

50. Hire an SEO specialist

Once you have exhausted your own knowledge of SEO, it may be necessary to hire a specialist who can advise you on how to proceed with your site's search engine needs. They tend to have a greater knowledge of details that will help get your site higher.

51. Break a Record

It may seem like a gimic, and it is, but breaking a world record of some kind is a great way to get your website traffic. News agencies will pick up a quirky story about a site going for an obscure record, and even if you fail you get the benefit of press.

52. Ask your customers

Your customers know one thing, what they want, so get their feedback about what would bring them back. Customer feedback is guaranteed to give you ideas.

53. Look for niche markets

Targeting small groups with dedicated members is a great way to increase your site's traffic. Find a group you would like to market to, read other sites associated with them, then create content aimed at these users and promote it on their sites. This is a great way to expand as well.

In Conclusion…

Hopefully these ideas have given you the impetus you need to get started on promoting your site. If you have a great idea that we don’t have listed here, why not let us know? If it’s useful and/or funny enough, it may just make it in. (With a link back to your site as compensation for contributing, to boot!)

Dr. Shawn Allin

I regret to inform the community that Dr. Shawn Allin was found unconscious in his office this morning and was taken to Spring Hill Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

All of us who loved Shawn - his parents, family members, colleagues and students - mourn the loss of this superb teacher who was truly a man for others.

Our community will gather for a memorial service at 5:00 p.m. today in St. Joseph Chapel, followed by a gathering in the Cloister at approximately 5:30 p.m. for those who wish to share support.

Greg Lucey, SJ
President
Spring Hill College

Dr. Allin was the first friend I made at Spring Hill College.  I was a somewhat older incoming freshman; at 21, I was still too young to be considered an 'adult' student, and far too old to really fit in with the other freshmen.

My very first class was General Chemistry, with Dr. Shawn Allin.  He was new to Spring Hill then, as was I, and the two of us hit it off immediately.  On the very first day, he sent me home with two of his books: a pop science by John Gribbin and a collection of SciAm articles by Stephen Jay Gould.  I stayed up half the night reading both of them, and returned them first thing the next morning.  I still remember the smile he gave me then: "Eric," he started, in his distinct Canadian accent, "I anticipate this will be the start of a great friendship."

More than any other teacher at Spring Hill, Shawn gave me guidance.  He introduced me to a favorite hobby of his: paleontology; and I subsequently spent a summer in the Dakota badlands digging up trike bones in the gumbo buttes.  When I started straying from science (physics and math was my thing back then) and turning toward philosophy, he was there for me.  He helped me adjust to the idea of keeping true to what I felt drawn toward, and argued philosophy of science with me a number of times.

Shawn went through a lot.  His divorce shocked me; Lynn was a common sight on campus, as she was getting an undergraduate degree.  That she left him immediately after graduating...  .:sigh:.  One cannot help but to wonder if she stayed with him near the end just to get the free tuition.  And finding out that he was leaving Spring Hill at the same time as I... ...

There is a part of me that wishes to say that I hope his death was the path he chose, rather than the path that some random occurence took him in.  I know this sounds strange, but the part of me that wishes to share that thought is somehow more significant than all the other parts of me put together.

Dr Allin was a great teacher.  Shawn was a great friend.  Maybe it was not premeditated.  Maybe it was.  I cannot say for sure.  But if it was...  I think there is some part of me that somewhat understands why he chose as he did.

I will miss you, Shawn.  Thank you for all you ever did for me.

Note: A follow-up to this was posted in March 2021.

A senior reminisces about his time at Spring Hill College

Note: This article was originally posted in The SpringHillian, a student-run newspaper at Spring Hill College. It ran in Volume 84 Issue 20.

I hate Spring Hill College.

I hate the pre-club drinking outside my dorm window every Thursday night my sophomore year.

I hate the cafeteria attempt­ing to give me vegetarian options by cooking random vegetables I've never heard of and ruining an otherwise good meal.

I hate the daily smoking out­side the front door of O'Leary that forced my windows closed on even the nicest of days. I hate the constant smell of marijuana in the halls of Murray that made me so sick that I had to hold my breath every time I used the restroom at 2 a.m., and I hate the ignorance of fellow students on matters of very great import.

I hate the petitions where most signers sign just because of the popularity of the guy/girl who is sitting behind the booth. I hate the prejudice that causes 95% of students to continuously avoid me even after four years at this godforsaken college.

I hate the elections of our joke of an SGA, the politics that govern the various groups of friends on campus, and the com­plete inability of what few people I do meet to comprehend (let alone appreciate) basic stances of morality such as pacifism and veganism.

But thankfully, none of that is what I pay my tuition for. I love my classes, especially the philos­ophy department. Dr.s Kobelja, Forstrom, and Morgan have repeatedly made me think about issues I'd never considered before, a feat well worth atten­tion.

Dr. Cyphert is the most pre­cise teacher I've ever seen, and though his classes are tough, once you've finished one of his courses, you realize that you've learned a lot.

Dr. Allin, whom I only had the chance to take a couple of classes with, introduced me to so much, including Stephen Jay Gould, for which I am eternally grateful. My literature classes broadened my horizons on the fiction front, and my history classes did the same for nonfiction. My sole writing class gave me the confidence I desperately needed in my writing skills; my theology classes taught me the lesson that there are a lot of peo­ple who can actually be intelli­gent and have faith in some ran­dom religion at the same time.

But classes are not all that I enjoyed during my stay here.

I love my friends, who all care for me for whom I am. I love the bookstore that constantly gave me a supply of new reading materials at the beginnmg of each semester. I love the new library, whose halls introduced me to so much that I would not have other­wise read.

I love the grass that gave me a place to read, and the old AB computer lab, that allowed me a chance to chat online while look­ing out at the golf course late in the evening.

I love the chapel, where I could wake at three in the morn­ing and play the piano, or just cry in the pews until I fell asleep and was woken early the next morn­ing by the sunlight.

I love Carpe Diem, and the attic above the chapel, and the golf course when the sprinklers are on early in the morning. I love staying overnight in the stu­dent center three years ago in order to sign up for housing, and playing video games on the big screen in the bio building until the cleaning crew came in.

I love Spring Hill College.

—Eric Herboso, '06

On Infanticide

[This was originally written for a grade in a Bioethics class with Stacey Welch. It is written in the style of "creative nonfiction", which presents nonfictional ideas, but does so with fictional stylized elements. In this case, I slightly misrepresent how much prior thought I'd given to infanticide before writing this paper, and act as though I hold or have held positions that I did not actually hold in reality. The argument itself, on the other hand, is presented truthfully.]

Introduction

Don’t get me wrong; I dislike the thought of killing babies as much as the next man, but unless one examines one’s beliefs in detail, how can one ever know whether his or her beliefs are rational and logically consistent in the least?  It is for this reason that I have decided to do my bioethics paper on infanticide—it is, after all, one of the few subjects that I have very strong feelings for while simultaneously having never done any serious research on the topic in the past.  What better candidate for writing a bioethics paper on, then?  Not only do I get a chance to write an essay on a topic wholly relevant and important to the course, but I also get to research one of my long-held beliefs in order to verify whether or not it is justifiable.  (This is something that I believe all agnostics should do, simply as a matter of course.)  I simply could not pass this chance up.  I hope you will enjoy.  I certainly enjoyed writing it.

I should note, I suppose, that this paper is very far removed from what most would consider ‘formal’ philosophical writing.  But since philosophy has a history of nonstandard ‘hermit-crab-esque’ forms, I figure writing in creative nonfiction would be both fun and good practice.  (I hope to write for a much less formal audience one day—hopefully it is not too much of a pipe dream.)

So onto infanticide, then.  Before doing all this research, I thought, like most of my readers, I’d imagine, that it was one of the few things that you could easily get a lot of people to agree upon.  Surely infanticide is bad, I would think.  Most everyone agrees that democide and patricide and genocide is bad—but even those hold-outs who try for a better world through eugenics of one form or another could not possibly stomach infanticide.  The killing of infants very literally guarantees the innocence of the victims, and killing the innocent has a long standing tradition of being considered immoral.  From a purely psychological natural selection viewpoint, those societies which embraced the killing of innocents surely would not have outlasted those that shunned it.  Of course, those societies that recommended infanticide for certain infants who would be unable to pull their weight in terms of society itself would certainly be more than okay, but this is but a utilitarian viewpoint: the killing of an innocent infant is still wrong; it’s just that when weighed against the value of what it would take to allow such children to live, it turns out to be better for the world at large if the infant were to die.

But what I’ve learned in my research is that this preliminary investigation is just plain incorrect.  As it turns out, the killing of an innocent infant is not inherently wrong.  And unless the argument I’m about to present[1] fails to sway you to the same conclusion, then you, too, will be forced to admit that infanticide has no inherent negative connotation whatsoever.

Justification For Presenting The Argument

Firstly, let me rid you of any moral indignation you may have against infanticide as a rule.  Let us say that you think infanticide is wrong no matter what.  Given such a belief, do you wish to leave it as just a belief, or would you prefer to analyze it in order to see the belief’s strengths and weaknesses?  Even if you prefer it to be just a belief, wouldn’t a thorough understanding of it allow you to be better able to spread this belief to others?  Further, consider this: many times throughout history, man has been absolutely sure of things which we know now to be not so sure.  From the discovery of geometries apart from Euclidean, to the understanding of common senseless quantum physics as fundamental to reality, to the acceptance of Gödel’s theorem showing mathematics may never be complete, to the widespread knowledge that women are inferior to men, history is rife with examples showing that what may seem to be correct to our present-day senses may one day be shown to be completely backwards, once the realities of the situation are more fully understood.  So I recommend to you that you keep your mind open not only to argument, but to the fact that your lack of an argument says something inherent about your beliefs, even if you disagree with the findings I give herein.

Intrinsic Worth of Human Life

Now I will begin with the concept of the intrinsic worth of human life.  This is separate from the total worth of human life; if I run a farm and need a new farmhand, part of the worth of having a child will be to help with the farm.  But this worth is not intrinsic to the life itself.  The intrinsic worth is what is valuable about the life in and of itself.  It is the value of living.

In most cases, the value of living is always positive.  The question, then, becomes: where does the value of living remain positive?  The best way to answer this is to look at a few specific cases.  Consider a tree.  What is the worth of a tree?  Obviously, in today’s ecologically-centered thought, there is much worth in the life of a tree.  But what is its intrinsic worth?

What makes this question so difficult to answer is that we aren’t really sure what it would be like to be a tree.  But Descartes’ malicious demon aside, we can certainly know some things about being a tree—or at least know what we don’t know, and utilize Ockham’s Razor to come to a decision about what it must be like to be a tree.  Firstly, trees have no brain, no central nervous system, nor any system of nerves at all.  They have senses, certainly, but their interpretation of their senses seem nonrational in any way we choose to look at it.  Certainly, this is not to say that trees are definitely not rational, but the evidence we have seems to indicate no self-knowledge.  And, assuming we’re all okay with using evidence to support conclusions despite Humean inductive problems, this is enough to say that a tree has no intrinsic worth of life.

This is a strange conclusion to come to, though I’ve noticed it is for different reasons with different people.  Some are inclined to say “Of course!  Did you actually think the lives of trees had intrinsic worth?”, whereas others remark that they had always just assumed that the lives of trees had intrinsic worth, merely because of the fact that they are alive.  Of course, we could counter this line of argument by simply asserting that life itself has worth, but Ockham’s Razor[2] does away with that very nicely—why assume life has worth when you can just as easily have that it didn’t?

So, if it isn’t life itself that gives worth, but instead something that we humans have, yet trees do not, then what is it?  The clinching factor for deciding that the lives of trees do not have intrinsic worth is its apparent inability to see itself as itself over some period of time.  Whereas we value our lives for being able to see that it is indeed our lives, a tree is apparently unable to do the same.  Hence, the intrinsic value of their lives has no worth.

The first answer to the question of where the value of living remains positive would then seem to be with those beings that recognize themselves as beings over a period of time.  But this is not a wholly sufficient answer, though it definitely seems to be a necessary condition.  If a being does not have the quality of recognizing itself as a being over a period of time, then it cannot possibly value its own life—after all, you cannot value what you yourself do not know you possess.[3]

Even though this quality is merely a necessary condition, and not a sufficient condition for where the value of living remains positive, I feel that it is an appropriate for the sake of this argument to accept it as equivalent.  My reasoning for this is simple.  If the correct decision between two options is unclear, and one decision encompasses the other decision in scope but adds additional imperatives, then it is best to decide upon the more strict option.[4]  Now, we have a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition.  We must choose what we will consider as equivalent to where the value of living remains positive.  Any possible options for equivalency must include the necessary condition we’ve already found.  So if we must decide between options, where one option is the necessary condition by itself, and every other option is the necessary condition plus additional stuff, then it is best to decide upon the option consisting of just the necessary condition.[5]

But our definition is a bit too narrow here, as the intrinsic worth of the life of a sleeping man does have positive value, though he may not be recognizing himself as a person during his sleep.  (Or, if sleeping is not far enough removed for you, consider a comatose man.)  We must add in the disclaimer that beings who once had the aforementioned quality still qualify as having positive value, unless they are in a state where they will definitely not have the quality ever again in the future (such as when the being is dead).  All beings that have this quality (and all its clarifications) I will call persons.

Negative Worth

So far, we have assumed that the intrinsic value of life is always positive, but it is clear with a little thought that sometimes it is not.  There are many debilitative diseases which are wholly incurable given current technology, and suicide among persons with such problems is not exactly rare.  The concept of rational suicide, if accepted, shows clearly that sometimes the value of living is negative.  In such cases, it would be wrong not to kill such people.  I will go into detail on this topic with a very specific birth defect which, in the most serious of cases, is a significant cause for alarm.

Myelomeningocele (spina bifida cystica) is a birth defect occurring in as many as one out of every hundred births (in areas with diets lacking in folic acid).  In the more severe cases, the child will be permanently paralyzed from the waist down and lack control of bowels and bladder.  In 90% of cases, a condition known as hydrocephalus occurs simultaneously with myelomeningocele, where excess fluid accumulates in the brain, resulting in mental disabilities.  In the worst cases, although the technology to allow these children to grow past their teenage years does exist, the paralysis, incontinence, and mental disability can never be overcome.  Their lives are filled with pain and discomfort, requiring around 40 major surgeries to prevent curvature of the spine, and other abnormalities, all before their teenage years.

The only way to decide if such a child’s life has positive or negative worth is to ask them—we cannot possibly know without getting into their heads, which is impossible.  But if we know that an infant, who is not yet a person as per our definition, is to lead a life so rife with misery and suffering, and will have to do so with mental disabilities making incapable of enjoying intellectual pleasures aside, why should we shoulder such a burden upon them?  Certainly, if their lives have positive extrinsic worth, then they should definitely live.  With parents to love them and take care of them, much can be said of the value of their life in a positive way.  But if they lack all extrinsic value, then who in their right mind would force such a child into existence?



Current Practice

Most NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) physicians have already thought long and hard on this point, seeing as how they have to deal with it every day.  One is quoted by Peter Singer on infants weighing less than 500 grams: “We generally keep them warm and let them expire by themselves.  These are not viable babies, and it’s crazy to do anything more.”  The accepted term of the medical community is to “let nature take its course”.  It is another name for killing.

The records on how many current physicians use the method of “letting nature take its course” with patients is unclear, simply because a method for keeping track of such statistics is currently unavailable.  But given the percentage of how many severe cases of myelomeningocele survive past the first week, it may be that as many as 80% of physicians use this method of legal killing in order to relieve the suffering of the infant.  When I first heard this number, I was simply astounded; realizing that infanticide, as a current practice, is not only defensible, but actually does occur was wholly enlightening to me.

Objections

There are many possible objections to the line of argument presented in this paper.  First, one might argue on the definition of personhood.  After all, by the definition given here, a significant number of humans do not qualify as persons (such as anencephalics, fetuses, and brain dead comatose victims), and an even more significant number of nonhumans end up actually qualifying as persons (such as dogs, cats, cows, and pigs, to name a few).  But before you discount our definition of ‘person’ just because you do not like who it includes or excludes, remember that once it was considered obvious that women are not really persons, and before that it was differing races that were not really persons, and before that it was barbarian non-Greeks who were not fully persons.  Better to proceed by logical argument than to merely assume an answer based upon one’s preferences.

Another objection might be to say personhood and having an interest in life are wholly separate.  But given how we arrived at our definition of personhood (as equivalent to the necessary condition for having an interest in life), this objection merely reduces to not liking the usage of the word person in this argument.  As a reply, I submit that such an objector should cross out all references to “person” in this essay and instead change them to “qwerty”.  Now personhood and having an interest in life is wholly separate, and I cannot imagine a further objection to linking qwerty with having an interest in life.

A stronger objection might be made on religious grounds.  To such an objector, I have no ready reply, other than to point out that they could equally object to Galileo for saying the Earth revolves round the sun, or to Newton for noticing the inverse square of the distance relates to the strength of gravity upon another object.

It is the strongest objection that I leave for last, precisely because I feel that it is strong enough to make the rest of this paper be taken with a grain of salt.  This is the objection by extreme deviation from social mores.  Such an objector might say: “Your argument is all well and good, but we should not allow it to change our opinion of infanticide in polite society.  What the prohibition on infanticide does is keep such doctors who practice it on a regular basis in check—every time they are forced to make the decision to ‘let nature take its course’, it takes a toll upon them, and causes them to make such a decision only as a last resort in the most extreme of circumstances.  Were infanticide to be considered inherently amoral, then such decisions would be easier for physicians, and it might cause mistakes and missteps to be made which would not have otherwise have occurred.  As such, it is best for the community at large if it is continued to be believed that infanticide is immoral.”  To such an objector, I have no reply, mainly because I am just such an objector.  Nevertheless, it is clear that this objection does not change the fundamental thrust of this paper’s argument, but merely its implementation in the real world.

Conclusion

Hopefully my argument (influenced mainly by Peter Singer) has been substantive enough to at least make the reader think, if not enough to convince.  Viewing infants as non-persons whose right to life stems more from continued existence of pleasure and freedom from pain than because their lives have positive intrinsic value is definitely a strange viewpoint, but even strange viewpoints should be considered if they are well argued for.  My only hope is that this paper has been well argued enough.    (c;

For reference, I used the following in preparation, research, and in collecting data for usage in this paper:

• Ethical Issues in Aiding the Death of Young Children, by H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.
• Avoiding Anomalous Newborns, by Michael L. Gross
• Examinations of Arguments in Favor of Withholding Ordinary Medical Care from Defective Infants, by John A. Robertson
• Euthanasia: Emerging from Hitler’s Shadow, by Peter Singer
• Is the Sanctity of Life Ethic Terminally Ill?, by Peter Singer
• Justifying Infanticide, by Peter Singer
• Practical Ethics, by Peter Singer
• Life-and-Death Decisions in the Midst of Uncertainty, by Robert F. Weir

Particular attention was given to Practical Ethics, by Peter Singer, without which this paper would not have been possible.

[1]:
I should start with a few definitions before I actually begin the argument, just to make sure everyone’s on the same page.  Feel free to refer to these notes as you’re reading.

• Infanticide is the killing of infant humans by adult humans as a continued practice.  It does not refer to single occurrences, nor does it apply to nonhumans.
• Infants are human children ranging in age from just after birth to forty-five days after birth.  I realize this is nonstandard usage, but the argument fails to apply if the usual age range is included.
• Ockham’s Razor, as used in this paper, refers to the recommendation of one choice over other choices, where: all choices are equally plausible, no choices explain more than any other, and the recommended choice requires less assumptions than any of the others.
• The intrinsic worth of life is the value of a life to the being living that life.
• A person is a being with a positive intrinsic worth of life; for the purposes of this essay, a being that recognizes itself as a being over a period of time or at one point did so in the past with high likelihood of doing so again in the future.
• To let nature take its course means to allow a being to die when the capability to save that being is available.  It is the most commonly used legal method to kill human beings.

[2]:
I should probably note here my own reservations about utilizing Ockham’s Razor.  I don’t feel that a principle regarding the likelihood of certain scenarios being above others simply due to their lack of assumptions holds much water.  But however blunt I think Ockham’s Razor might be, it is a necessary tool for much (if not all) of science, and should thusly not be avoided while I simultaneously type this essay on a computer; to do otherwise seems a bit hypocritical of me.

[3]:
This does not mean that beings without this quality have worthless lives; it merely means that the worth of their lives is not intrinsic; it is in relation to some other thing.

[4]:
In other words, if it is unclear as to whether cursing or cursing with the Lord's name is the wrong thing to do, then it is best to not curse at all, since that way you're guaranteed to be correct in either case: you won't ever be cursing with the Lord's name, nor will you ever be cursing at all.

[5]:
The assumption here is that we will treat differently those who have a positive intrinsic value of life than those without.  By making our decision to choose all those with the necessary condition, it is absolutely impossible that we will leave any beings out that do have a positive intrinsic value to life, even though it is certainly possible that we will be including beings who have the necessary condition but lack the sufficient conditions that we are unable to find.

Worthy of Attention: Infanticide

[This essay was intended to be published as a Worthy of Attention article on the Panangelium.tk site. However, the site shut down before it was published. I am publishing it here on the date that the essay was initially drafted; had it been published, it would have first been edited and likely would not have been posted for another couple of weeks from this publishing date. Note that ideas from this article were used in On Infanticide, a paper that was submitted for a grade in a bioethics class.] 

Peter Singer is one of my favorite authors.  He ranks right up there with Stephen Jay Gould, Howard Zinn, Charlie Kaufman, Orson Scott Card, and Douglas Hofstadter.  So when the chance came up to write a book (or movie) review for my Deviant Behavior class, naturally I was quite ecstatic.  I have so many favorite writers (both for film and book format), and I was sure that any that I'd choose would be great--so how did I come up with Peter Singerahead of all others?

One word: infanticide.

Last summer, you see, I spent my afternoons on the lawn in front of the Washington Monument reading Peter Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life, a compilation of some of his previous works, most notably from Practical Ethics.  Reading Singer's book gave me a singular frame of mind--usually, philosophy does much to make me think, but it is rare to find cogent arguments presented for ethics in particular, precisely because it so difficult to arrive at soundness from cogency when dealing with fields such as ethics.  So as I read Singer, I felt a deep kinship between his words and my thoughts, not because I had thought such things before (in point of fact, I really hadn't), but because his words were actively convincing me that his viewpoint was the correct one to take.  He convinced me so well that now, but a few months later, I can actively say that I fully agree with Singer on many of the issues he brought up in Writings on an Ethical Life.  It is one such viewpoint that I felt most fully epitomized the concept of deviant behavior (so much so that the topic alone caused me to choose Singer over Kaufman, whom I think would also have made for a good paper), and it is on that topic that I plan to write this paper: infanticide.

As a philosopher, Peter Singer is attempting to create a viewpoint for understanding moral issues that is both consistent and follows from premises that he believes all men will admit as obvious.  I am reminded of the story of Descartes, where he finds a copy of Euclid's Elements lying open at Proposition 45.  There he reads how to construct a parallelogram equal in area to any given rectangular figure with a given rectilinear angle.  Unbelieving that this could be possible, Descartes is referred to Proposition 44, which he also disbelieves.  So he flips back further and further, at each point disbelieving what is written, and yet following the dependencies of Euclid's logic.  Until finally, he arrives at the initial axioms, and exclaims aghast: "So it all must be true!"

In the same way, Singer attempts to give initial axioms which cannot be disbelieved, even in the face of very strange deductions, and then he attempts to construct an ethical system which follows from these initial conditions.  Hopefully, I will be able to reconstruct his argument in this essay.  I will start with a few premises which I hope will be immediately accepted.

• First, that it is wrong to discriminate against one individual and for another on the basis of criteria which has nothing to do with the decision at hand.  (To decide against a minority applicant in favor of a non-minority applicant for the sole reason that they are a minority applicant is not ethically justifiable.)
• Second, that the ending of the life of a person has negative value.  (It is wrong to kill a person in every non-teleological ethic.  Even if a teleological ethic is used, the ending of the life of a person is assigned a negative value in all circumstances.)
• Third, that if the correct decision between two options is unclear, and one decision encompasses the other decision in scope but adds additional imperatives, then it is best to decide upon the more strict option.  (If it is unclear as to whether cursing or cursing with the Lord's name is the wrong thing to do, then it is best to not curse at all, since that way you're guaranteed to be correct in either case: you won't ever be cursing with the Lord's name, nor will you ever be cursing at all.)
• Fourth, that Ockham's Razor is true.  (Given two equally plausible explanations where neither explains more than the other, and where one explanation requires more assumptions than the other, then it is best to more easily accept the explanation that requires less assumptions.)

Singer's first point is that of the definition of the word "person".  Historically, the word 'person' has had many different meanings.  There was a time when some humans were given the distinction of being called persons, while other humans (whether they were called barbarians, slaves, or women) were considered 'less than a person'.  So it is difficult to give an accurate definition.

One wants to give all humans the benefit of the doubt, but this goes against our first premise.  If we do not have a good definition of person, then why exclude nonhumans from our list of potential persons?  The question is: what makes a person a person?  That they are human is insufficient.  If an alien were to ring your doorbell, and you were to open your door, see that it was an alien, and then promptly shoot it with your gun, would you not feel bad about it afterward?  And it would not be because you had shot some non-person thing, but instead you would feel bad because you would have shot a person.  Obviously, the status of being Homo sapiens is not identical to the status of personhood.

What, then, does it take to be a person?  One required condition, Singer argues, is that the being feels that it is the same being from one moment to the next.  Surely, we would not assign personhood to anyone who lacked that quality.  If a being is unable to distinguish itself continuously from one moment to the next, and (further) has never in the past been able to distinguish itself continuously from one moment to the next, then that being is definitely not a person.

While Singer only gives a necessary condition for personhood, and is unable to furnish a defendable sufficient condition, by our third axiom it is clear as to whom we should consider persons: at the very least, we should consider all beings who have the necessary condition for personhood to be persons.  Although we will probably end up including a few nonpersons in our list of what is considered to be a person, we will at least not be excluding any potential persons from our list, and that is what is most important.

(It should be noted here that this list happens to include many nonhuman animals, such as dogs, cats, cows, and pigs.  It is for this [among other] reason[s] that I am vegetarian and an aspiring vegan.  Furthermore, I have quite serious thoughts on fructarianism, which many find to be particularly ludicrous, but whatever.)

So now we have clarified our second axiom by choosing an appropriate meaning for 'person', even though we could not find the exact definition of the term.  Where, then, does Singer go from here, and how does any of this mumbo-jumbo relate to infanticide?

As it turns out, it relates pretty darn directly.  Infants, by our very broad and quite generous consideration of terms, are not persons.  As such, we need a separate rule to say that it is wrong to end the life of an infant, or else we may end up admitting that it is not inherently negative that an infant die.  (Keep in mind here, that this is not an argument that the death of infants is not generally negative--of course it is negative--but that its negativity arises not from the inherent value assigned to the death of an infant in general, but instead to mitigating circumstances: the potential of the infant to turn into a person at some future point, the desires of the parents and family who may want the infant to live very much, the need of a beginning society to have as many new children as possible, etc.)  But by axiom four, inserting yet another premise is unacceptable when we could equally admit the negative value of most infant death to mitigating circumstances.

Of course, at this point, Singer argues, we might say that all of this is but pedantic nonsense, and is totally useless--for why in this day and age would infanticide be even considered?  But it turns out to be far more relevant than any of us might like to admit.

The field of bioethics, it turns out, constantly has to grapple with the inconsistency of infanticide being generally considered immoral by the public, and yet regularly practiced by physicians in the heat of neonatal care.  The standard phrase used in the medical community is "letting nature take its course".  According to one NICU physician, stating hospital policy on infants weighing in at less than 500 grams: "We generally keep them warm and let them expire by themselves.  These are not viable babies, and it's crazy to do anything more."  In most severe cases of Myelomeningocele (spina bifida cystica), which occur in as many as one out of every hundred births in areas with diets lacking in folic acid, physicians are genereally relieved when the infant has a complication.  Because then they may recommend to the parent that they "let nature take its course", so the infant may die at a young age.  When an infant with severe myelomeningocele doesn't have a complication, then it is cause for worry; such children are generally completely paralyzed, with severe brain damage due to hydrocephalus.  Modern technology is able to keep such children alive up to their preteen years, but they always live with severe pain and discomort, which when added to paralysis, incontinence, and intellectual disability is enough to cause most doctors to hope for a complication to arise during the infant stages so that they may recommend "letting nature take its course".  This is, no matter how one looks at it, legal infanticide.  (In point of fact, the vast majority (~80% as of Singer's 2000 publication date) of the worst cases of spina bifida cystica are not given life-saving treatment.)

Singer argues that infanticide, as practiced by physicians today, is wholly justifiable.  Though it seems strange and 'out there' at first--it certainly is a prime candidate for "deviant behavior" if I ever saw one--infanticide has a fairly good justification as told by Peter Singer.