How much content should I have before I begin promoting my site?

[Sunfrog]

How much content should I have before I begin promoting my site? I noticed that one site still has the Loreum Ipsum stuff on it, yet the owner is already promoting it. Since this person is my hero should I begin promoting my site too?

Is he doing this because he intends to sell it and wants to leave something for the new buyer to do, or is it some kind of strategy? When should I make a site map and submit it to the search engines?

[Mystic]

You should have some content before promoting it. Otherwise people would come, see that there is nothing usefull on the website and leave. If you have good content on the other hand they may bookmark you, subscribe to your rss feed etc. It will help you to hold on to the visitors.

[boron]

Before publishing you should develope a site to an extent it won't look as an "under construction" site. Make some pages and put some useful, completed content on it. Check that there won't be any links with no content. It's not important how big is the site at the time of publishing, but it is not good to delete pages after publishing. Google lists those pages even after you delete them and when someone will click on them, he/she will get 404 error - non existing page. Spiders also notice this and consider the site as bad developed. You can add new pages after publishing of course.

You can create a sitemap and put the link of it on the home page (so the sitemap will open as a new page. You may or may not subscribe this sitemap in Google, there are very different opinions about the benefit of doing this.

After some days Google will find and index your site anyway. If you make few backlinks on sites with some PR, indexing will be even faster - in few days.

[Submerge]

Definitely more than Lorem Ipsum. Let's give a general figure, how about enough to keep someone busy for 5 minutes. That way your visitors may think you're the real deal.