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How To Promote Your Internet Business
There are many different ways to promote your
products, your services and website, as well as, methods that you
should avoid. I'll give you a little explanation of each. As you
will readily note, not all methods are
created equal -- and are dependent upon the product, service or
program you are promoting:
Promotion Methods That Could Cause
Problems
Submit to FFA Pages
The effectiveness of FFA, in my opinion, is rather useless if you are wanting to get people to actually read your listing.
And, since Google has been looking closer at what the sites are linking
too, you may want to choose a different promotional method for your site. FFA (Free For All) are
link
directories that are usually discounted by the search engines, and
may cause you more harm than good.
Submit to Link Farms
Many people have placed their links into link farms. That was
good thing in the "good old days". But those days are gone.
You will no longer get good rankings from the search engines.
Instead, you may see your page ranking fall or your page removed
from the search engines Index.
Paid Linking-Follow the Google
Rules
Linking has it's pluses and minuses, as you will soon see. Paying for links
was a viable way to increase page rank. That
is definitely changing. Google is really coming down on paid links on other people's site, so you should be aware of the Google rules before you make a decision to pay for links to increase your page
rank or have paid links on your site. It can cost you your business if they ban you for improprieties.
Rules To Follow If you Put A Paid Link On Your Site
1. redirect through URL that is blocked by your robots.txt file
2. Use 302 redirect through URL
3. Apply rel-"nofollow" attribute
Though these rules have caused a stir, the bottom line is this: Do
you want to be indexed or not; or do you want to be de-listed, for
that matter.
Promotion Methods to Consider
Article Writing
Article writing
is a good way to get one-way links. One important factor about writing articles is making sure that you create an article that is targeted toward your website and or web page that you want to promote. Why? When you submit your articles to the free article directories you want the right type of website picking you up. For example, if you have a website on computers, you really don't want a website whose main topic is dogs to link to you. Though the search engines will count the link, it will be counted in the area of less importance. If your article is targeted correctly it will reach the right websites and pull up your page popularity ranking.
Make sure you have a quality resource box at the end of your article. This is your calling call, or ad to bring people to your site.
Contribute to A Forum
If you can contribute helpful information to a forum - and you can have your website signature in you name. No blatant advertising will be tolerated, for the sole
purpose of most forums is to contribute helpful information to its participants.
Viral Marketing
Create an ebook
and give it away for free. Of course, you should supply appropriate links to the
affiliate services and products that is relevant to the content you are writing about. And you should also encourage others to download the ebook, as well as, put the free ebook on their site.
Pay-Per-Click
If you have the money to invest in Google Adwords or Yahoo Search or some of the other search engines pay-per-click programs you can make some money. Here you create an ad or ads relevant to your affiliate program, and place a bid on the keywords you select. This takes time, energy, persistence and money – and research. Also, I would advise that you read your affiliate programs rules, as well as, the rules of Google Adwords before jumping into the pay-per-click arena. You usually have to put “aff” after your ad or something similar to that – it’s dependent upon the affiliate program you are in. The idea with pay-per-click is that you pay only when the individual clicks on your ad.
If you are new to Google Adwords you should take a look at
Beating Adwords. Beating Adwords shows you the right way to
advertise with Google Adwords. From learning about affiliate programs,
creating ads that sell to the landing page, plus advanced topics-It's a
complete guide.
Pay-Per-Click Sites To Consider
- 7Search
- Google
- Miva (formerly FindWhat)
- Yahoo Search
SEO Marketing
SEO Marketing is another method in which you can promote your
website and web pages. But the process is long-but the benefits
are great if you can learn how to set up each page to bring your
pages within the top 10 of Google or Yahoo or MSN, as well as, the
other search engines.
Email Marketing
This method does require you to build your own email list. Be
it through the collection of emails through opt-in of your
newsletter, or product. Collecting emails does require the use of an
autoresponder. There are online autoresponders that have a monthly
cost, or you can go with a stand-alone autoresponder that you can
utilize on your server. One such autoresponder is Ultimate
Autoresponder-yes you have to pay for it-but it is only a one
time charge, with the capability to use text, html, audio and video emails automatically.
Other Ways To Promote
Other ways to promote your website, product or service is through:
1) Squidoo lens-
offers you another way to get you, your business or your products before
the masses.
2) Ebay Feeder Pages- Useful in promoting your products
3) Social Media Marketing- Before partaking in this area, be sure to do
your research. I would suggest participating in the chosen Social Media's
forum before you ever start trying to market yourself, your brand or
website. That way you have the favor of the community, you know what and
how to market appropriately within their community. Note that there are
many social media news networks, some are niche-based, others
general-based.
Examples of Social Networks are:
Metafilter
Digg
Shoutwire
Newsvine
Sphinn
Tweako
Twitter
StumbleUpon
One final note: If you
do it right you can get a lot of traffic-but for the short term. As to
return visits-maybe, maybe not-this is still a rather new medium.
If you
want to easily add Social Bookmarking icons to your blog
look at AddThis. AddThis
(currently supports Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress). You can create a free account, and they do most of the work when
adding the icon to your blog.
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