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Introduction Starting a business online or moving your existing offline business online can be a lot of fun if you get the right advice. The first problem most people face is the uncertainty of how to promote your website effectively and with a measurable ROI (Return On Investment) if you would like to know the “Top 10 Proven Methods” to promote your website then read on....
Free Advertising Methods
Search Engine Optimization
This is basically the task of optimizing your web pages to appear in the search engines and get free traffic, it is a very lengthy and complicated subject but I'll try and give you a brief overview of how it works, and if you want a more complete and detailed guide you will find one on day 2 of my free 5 day e-course which will be linked at the bottom of this article. You will need to make sure that your website is not made entirely in flash as this will cause problems with indexing (adding to the search engine database). You will need to make sure that the keywords and phrases that you would most like to rank for are included in these 3 key areas of your web page which are your url, page title, page content.
You Will Need To Get Links
You will also need to get links from other websites to point to your website, the more links you have the better you will rank (its a bit more complicated than this but it is simplified for this article). You will need to go get some links from other sites. The best ways of getting these can be from web 2.0 sites, like Squidoo and Hub Pages, there are also thousands of website directories online that you can submit for free to, and again the same with article sites you can submit content and get a link back as well. You can also use social bookmarking sites, and if your web page has an RSS feed then you can submit these to RSS directories too (not sure what RSS is? Don t worry it will be covered in detail in the free 5 day e-course mentioned further down this page).
Web 2.0 Sites
As well as getting back links to your website from these pages they also rank very well in the search engines and get extra exposure for your content that will pre-sell your prospects into visiting your website. Such sites include, Squidoo, Hub Pages, Wet Paint, Blogger, Wordpress and many more. They also all come with RSS feeds that can be submitted to RSS directories for extra links. Remember the more links that these pages have the more import the search engines will see that link being when its pointing to your main website, so build links on these intermediary pages too it will help with your Search Engine Optimization.
Article Syndication
Article marketing can be a fantastic way of generating free residual traffic of highly qualified prospects to your web page, there are many article sites you can submit to. The top 3 of these are ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and articlebase.com. They all have very high rankings in the search engines and have a lot of traffic. There are of course hundreds more that you can submit to if you feel like it.
What are the benefits of article syndication?
You can take advantage of the search engine positioning of the article sites and get free search engine traffic to your articles and then to your website.
You get a lot of on site traffic from people already at the website By providing valuable content to your prospects by the time they visit your website they are pre-sold and will be more receptive to what it is your offering.
It allows other website owners to post your article to their website on the condition that they leave your resource box intact which means you get a link back to your website as well as visitors that are reading your article on their website to come and visit yours. Online newsletter publishers will sometimes publish your article in their newsletter and you could have hundreds or thousands of visitors as a result.
Video Marketing
There are many online video sites such as Youtube, where anyone can post videos for free, these sites get a lot of traffic and the videos can sometimes go viral and get millions of views. There are about 35 main video sites worth posting too, if you want the complete list and links to software that can automate the submission process you will find information on this on day 3 of of my free 5 day e-course that you can signup for, you will find more information about this at the bottom of this article.
Forum Marketing
This is an often overlooked but still effective strategy for getting traffic, most forums allow you to setup and use a signature, this will appear at the bottom of every post or thread you start in the forum. Simply by joining a forum that is related to your website and joining in with the discussion will start to get you some residual traffic as a result.
Viral eBook Reports
If you are writing articles and content, you can also turn this into and ebook with links to your site, and give it away for free in your newsletter or submit it to one of the many ebook directories that exist on the Internet just Google the keyword “ebook directory” to find them.
Opted In List
You should be collecting the email address of visitors to your website when ever you can, once collected and you have a mailing list you can contact them with offers or updates at no advertising costs. If your building a web based business this is something that you really have to do or you will be leaving 80% of your profit on the table.
Affiliate Marketing
If you have your own product, you can setup an affiliate program and have other people sell your products or service on a commission only basis, this is an effective strategy and a pillar of success for many online business models.
Joint Ventures
Have a product? Why not do a join venture with someone that has a newsletter, have a blog why not do a JV and swop links with another Blogger that you think your visitors might like. You can JV for all kinds of things, be creative try and find a synergy where both parties benefit.
Paid Methods Of Advertising
Banner Space
You can contact website owners that have a relevant web page and inquire about banner advertising, if you get the right price and good targeting it can give you a good ROI.
Adwords Pay Per Click
This is a service run by Google that allows you bid of search engine keywords to have your advert appear next to the search results, depending on your market you may pay anywhere from $0.05 cents and upwards per click.
Yahoo Pay Per Click
This is a service run by Yahoo that allows you bid of search engine keywords from yahoo
MSN Pay Per Click
This is a service owned by Microsoft that allows you bid of search engine keywords form the MSN search engine.
Media Traffic Pay Per View
This is a company that allows you get pop up traffic, the minimum bid is $0.015. Yes that is one and a half cents a view.
eZine Advertising
This can be a fantastic way of getting massive amounts of targeted traffic very quickly, a lot of people who publish online newsletters allow advertisers to buy advertising in their newsletter. A “Solo Ad” which is where they mail you advert on its own to there entire list will useally cost approximately $10 per 1000 subscribers. So for example a newsletter of 30,000 people could cost you $300. There are newsletters in all kinds of sizes and topics to choose from the best place to find them is to do a search for “ezine directory” in Google and you can find sites that list ezines, some will even tell you if they accept advertising. The traffic comes in quite fast after the mailing is done between 1 – 2 days should see about 80% of it done, the rest will come in over the following 3 days and not very much then after. It is important to measure the results form ezine ads and test out different ad copy, you can use a link tracking service called budurl.com for tracking links for free. This will allow you to track how many people clicked on the link in the ad.
Online Classified Ad Sites
There are many free online classified ad sites springing up everywhere the biggist of these is Craigslist next to them would be Backpage and Gumtree. You can post free classified ads on these sites for all kinds of categories.
Offline Classified Ads
A good tactic to use is get a small lineage ad in the a real magazine or paper and use the smallest ad they sell to convince people to visit your website, where you bigger advert can be, you can use the online classified ad sites to test out different ad copy to find out what converts best before placing this ad, this can save you a lot of money. Remember to create curiosity in this ad don't try and sell the product sell the idea of them visiting the web page and let the website do the rest of the work. (you can find a complete list of classified ad sites and instructions on how to post to these sites in day 4 of my free 5 day e-course the link to this will be at the bottom of this article)
Facebook
Facebook allows you to advertise based on the demographic information of their user base. They use the pay per click model like the search engines do but you will find it a little bit cheaper due to less competition. But the fact your bidding on demographic information rather than keywords makes it a bit harder to get used to if you have been used to search engine marketing. But its an effective strategy none the less
eBay Classified Ads
eBay started to do a service known as classified ads, which for the first time when it was introduced allowed you to promote 3rd party websites from with in eBay without violating their policies. Ebay has a wealth of traffic just waiting to be exploited. The good thing about ebay traffic is that everyone there is a buyer they went there intending to buy something or looking for something that they may want to buy so they are quite easy to sell to. Alternatively if you selling physical products then you could look at selling them on eBay directly your self with out any need to send traffic to your main website.
Author: Ben Harbour
Free Advertising Methods
Search Engine Optimization
This is basically the task of optimizing your web pages to appear in the search engines and get free traffic, it is a very lengthy and complicated subject but I'll try and give you a brief overview of how it works, and if you want a more complete and detailed guide you will find one on day 2 of my free 5 day e-course which will be linked at the bottom of this article. You will need to make sure that your website is not made entirely in flash as this will cause problems with indexing (adding to the search engine database). You will need to make sure that the keywords and phrases that you would most like to rank for are included in these 3 key areas of your web page which are your url, page title, page content.
You Will Need To Get Links
You will also need to get links from other websites to point to your website, the more links you have the better you will rank (its a bit more complicated than this but it is simplified for this article). You will need to go get some links from other sites. The best ways of getting these can be from web 2.0 sites, like Squidoo and Hub Pages, there are also thousands of website directories online that you can submit for free to, and again the same with article sites you can submit content and get a link back as well. You can also use social bookmarking sites, and if your web page has an RSS feed then you can submit these to RSS directories too (not sure what RSS is? Don t worry it will be covered in detail in the free 5 day e-course mentioned further down this page).
Web 2.0 Sites
As well as getting back links to your website from these pages they also rank very well in the search engines and get extra exposure for your content that will pre-sell your prospects into visiting your website. Such sites include, Squidoo, Hub Pages, Wet Paint, Blogger, Wordpress and many more. They also all come with RSS feeds that can be submitted to RSS directories for extra links. Remember the more links that these pages have the more import the search engines will see that link being when its pointing to your main website, so build links on these intermediary pages too it will help with your Search Engine Optimization.
Article Syndication
Article marketing can be a fantastic way of generating free residual traffic of highly qualified prospects to your web page, there are many article sites you can submit to. The top 3 of these are ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and articlebase.com. They all have very high rankings in the search engines and have a lot of traffic. There are of course hundreds more that you can submit to if you feel like it.
What are the benefits of article syndication?
You can take advantage of the search engine positioning of the article sites and get free search engine traffic to your articles and then to your website.
You get a lot of on site traffic from people already at the website By providing valuable content to your prospects by the time they visit your website they are pre-sold and will be more receptive to what it is your offering.
It allows other website owners to post your article to their website on the condition that they leave your resource box intact which means you get a link back to your website as well as visitors that are reading your article on their website to come and visit yours. Online newsletter publishers will sometimes publish your article in their newsletter and you could have hundreds or thousands of visitors as a result.
Video Marketing
There are many online video sites such as Youtube, where anyone can post videos for free, these sites get a lot of traffic and the videos can sometimes go viral and get millions of views. There are about 35 main video sites worth posting too, if you want the complete list and links to software that can automate the submission process you will find information on this on day 3 of of my free 5 day e-course that you can signup for, you will find more information about this at the bottom of this article.
Forum Marketing
This is an often overlooked but still effective strategy for getting traffic, most forums allow you to setup and use a signature, this will appear at the bottom of every post or thread you start in the forum. Simply by joining a forum that is related to your website and joining in with the discussion will start to get you some residual traffic as a result.
Viral eBook Reports
If you are writing articles and content, you can also turn this into and ebook with links to your site, and give it away for free in your newsletter or submit it to one of the many ebook directories that exist on the Internet just Google the keyword “ebook directory” to find them.
Opted In List
You should be collecting the email address of visitors to your website when ever you can, once collected and you have a mailing list you can contact them with offers or updates at no advertising costs. If your building a web based business this is something that you really have to do or you will be leaving 80% of your profit on the table.
Affiliate Marketing
If you have your own product, you can setup an affiliate program and have other people sell your products or service on a commission only basis, this is an effective strategy and a pillar of success for many online business models.
Joint Ventures
Have a product? Why not do a join venture with someone that has a newsletter, have a blog why not do a JV and swop links with another Blogger that you think your visitors might like. You can JV for all kinds of things, be creative try and find a synergy where both parties benefit.
Paid Methods Of Advertising
Banner Space
You can contact website owners that have a relevant web page and inquire about banner advertising, if you get the right price and good targeting it can give you a good ROI.
Adwords Pay Per Click
This is a service run by Google that allows you bid of search engine keywords to have your advert appear next to the search results, depending on your market you may pay anywhere from $0.05 cents and upwards per click.
Yahoo Pay Per Click
This is a service run by Yahoo that allows you bid of search engine keywords from yahoo
MSN Pay Per Click
This is a service owned by Microsoft that allows you bid of search engine keywords form the MSN search engine.
Media Traffic Pay Per View
This is a company that allows you get pop up traffic, the minimum bid is $0.015. Yes that is one and a half cents a view.
eZine Advertising
This can be a fantastic way of getting massive amounts of targeted traffic very quickly, a lot of people who publish online newsletters allow advertisers to buy advertising in their newsletter. A “Solo Ad” which is where they mail you advert on its own to there entire list will useally cost approximately $10 per 1000 subscribers. So for example a newsletter of 30,000 people could cost you $300. There are newsletters in all kinds of sizes and topics to choose from the best place to find them is to do a search for “ezine directory” in Google and you can find sites that list ezines, some will even tell you if they accept advertising. The traffic comes in quite fast after the mailing is done between 1 – 2 days should see about 80% of it done, the rest will come in over the following 3 days and not very much then after. It is important to measure the results form ezine ads and test out different ad copy, you can use a link tracking service called budurl.com for tracking links for free. This will allow you to track how many people clicked on the link in the ad.
Online Classified Ad Sites
There are many free online classified ad sites springing up everywhere the biggist of these is Craigslist next to them would be Backpage and Gumtree. You can post free classified ads on these sites for all kinds of categories.
Offline Classified Ads
A good tactic to use is get a small lineage ad in the a real magazine or paper and use the smallest ad they sell to convince people to visit your website, where you bigger advert can be, you can use the online classified ad sites to test out different ad copy to find out what converts best before placing this ad, this can save you a lot of money. Remember to create curiosity in this ad don't try and sell the product sell the idea of them visiting the web page and let the website do the rest of the work. (you can find a complete list of classified ad sites and instructions on how to post to these sites in day 4 of my free 5 day e-course the link to this will be at the bottom of this article)
Facebook allows you to advertise based on the demographic information of their user base. They use the pay per click model like the search engines do but you will find it a little bit cheaper due to less competition. But the fact your bidding on demographic information rather than keywords makes it a bit harder to get used to if you have been used to search engine marketing. But its an effective strategy none the less
eBay Classified Ads
eBay started to do a service known as classified ads, which for the first time when it was introduced allowed you to promote 3rd party websites from with in eBay without violating their policies. Ebay has a wealth of traffic just waiting to be exploited. The good thing about ebay traffic is that everyone there is a buyer they went there intending to buy something or looking for something that they may want to buy so they are quite easy to sell to. Alternatively if you selling physical products then you could look at selling them on eBay directly your self with out any need to send traffic to your main website.
Author: Ben Harbour
