|
Promote
Your Business
Promote Your Business
How do you promote your online business?
You probably ask this question if you have just built a website or blog,
and you see no signs of activity. Meaning, no traffic.
How can that be. In your excitement, you may have just assumed that
traffic will automatically come without doing anything. Sad to say,
that's not true.
There are some promotion methods that will cost you nothing, except
the gathering of a working knowledge of the process and your hard
work. And others promotion methods will require you to use pocket
money, to to acquire some knowledge to move your website forward. But don't get
discouraged, it can be done.
I have found three methods of getting traffic to my site that
hold strong today as they did yesterday. And they are:
PPC-Buying it
Linking
Search Engine Marketing/SEO
Those are the standard, but there are other ways to getting your
site or blog noticed. But there are also ways in which you can
cause yourself some problems. I'll discuss both.
Myth About Internet
Marketing
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of
getting traffic, let me first dispel this common myth about an
online business. And that is, if you want traffic to come to your
site, you have to work. Too many people who begin an online business think that they can do a little work and people will
show up at their site, click on their links, and they will be in the money. Granted, that's a nice
concept, but without the work, it won't happen.
I don't want to discourage you, but be aware that Google usually
puts you (website) in the sandbox for 6 months, just to get the
flavor and legitimacy of your site. But that doesn't mean that you
should do nothing during that time. It means that you can position
yourself by beginning by doing some free methods of promotion that
are available to you.
How Do I Get
Traffic To My Website
How do I get traffic to my website? A question that is always
on any webmaster's or blogger's mind. As I said earlier, the consistent methods of getting traffic
for me has been through, SEO, PPC and linking. I'll discuss
linking, SEO, and PPC and then delve a little more into the other
methods of getting traffic.I also delve into some methods that may cause
you some problems if you're not careful.
Linking
First, linking can be paid or free. Below you will find some of the
free methods of getting
links.
Article Writing
Article writing is a good way to get one-way
links and free traffic to your website. 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.
As I mentioned earlier, article writing/marketing is a good way to get
one-way links. And it's free, except for your labor.
Contribute to A Forum
You can contribute helpful information to a forum, and leave your website
signature or blog signature at the end of the post-if allowed. Be sure and
follow the forum "etiquette" rules. You do not want to start off
on the wrong foot, or be banned before you even begin. In other words-
forums will not tolerate blatant advertising, just the sharing of information.
My advice is simple, when you first become a member of a forum it is wise to just read
and get the feel for the forum's environment. After you become
comfortable with the forum etiquette, it's time to contribute helpful information to its
participants.
Once you have gained the trust of fellow forum members, you will
gain increased credibility and eventually draw quality, targeted traffic to your site.
However, do not think that people will suddenly be streaming to your site.
It's not going to happen. This is a slow process, but it will bring
traffic to your site slowly.
Ezine Advertising
This is a very good method of advertising your product, service or
website. Some allow you to advertise for free, while others
will ask for a fee to place your ad in their ezine. What is
important here is that you choose the ezine that fits your
target market.
If you decide to go with a paid submission to an ezine-know what the fine
print says, and choose an ezine that has exposure to at least 500
subscribers. Less than that, will not benefit you at all. Remember
marketing is a numbers game.
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.
Working with PPC is not for the faint or heart. If you don't know what you
are doing, you can lose your budget in short order. You have to experiment with your ads, do some research and at
least allow yourself a $100 budget before getting your feet wet.
In addition, 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.
The idea with pay-per-click is that you pay only when the individual clicks on your ad.
Check out my review on Perry
Marshall's ebook on Google Adwords or if you're just want an idea of
how involved Google Adwords is check out my Google
Adwords Basics page.
Pay-Per-Click Sites To Consider
- 7Search
- Google Adwords
- Miva (formerly FindWhat)
- Yahoo
- Ask
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is optimization of your web pages to
gain page rank and position within the search engines. If done right, you can pull people to your website by it
relevancy.
If you're new to the Internet and Internet Marketing you may find SEO to
be a little overwhelming. Take your time, learn, and you'll
eventually reap great rewards-traffic. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, that is part of the learning process.
And....
SEO,
whether some want to admit it or not, compliments Pay-Per-Click
advertising and Adsense. Why? The common denominator is
"keywords".
Other Methods Of Marketing
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.
Podcasting
Podcasting is another avenue in which you can venture out into
advertising. If you get a following, you'll find that they will search you
out-be it to your blog or your website.
Email Marketing
This method does require you to build your own email list, be
it through the collection of email addresses through an opt-in
option for your newsletter, or product.
After you have developed a list, you will soon need the help of an
autoresponder. An autoresponder can help to automate the process
if you have a large list. If you have a small list-you can do it
manually or possibly go with a free autoresponder. However, be
aware, with a free autoresponder your readers will get the
privilege of getting ads from the website that gives you the free
service.
There are two types of autoresponders-online and stand-alone.
Usually the online autoresponder guides you step-by-step in setting
up your autoresponder.
A stand-alone relies exclusively on your knowledge.
Video
As you know, video is the big "in" thing on the
Internet. In fact, 50% of traffic is through video, with YouTube
taking in 12.5% of the traffic. This is a good way to get
traffic-and if you don't know-YouTube allows you to upload your
video for the world to see.
Social Media Marketing
1) Squidoo -
offers you another way to get you, your business or your products before
the masses.
2) 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
Facebook
Several notes: 1) 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.
Promotion Methods That Could Cause
Problems
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:
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.
Safelists
A safelist is a method of email advertising-it can be a free safelist
or a paid safelist. Once you
join the safe list, you can send out emails to the members that have
joined. In return, you also, must receive their emails. This
method
helps eliminate the fear of being called a spammer, because
everyone on the list has agreed to accept your email. Please note, that some
safelists can have thousands of members. So if you are thinking about
joining a safelist, I would advice creating a yahoo email or gmail
account because you will be inundated with emails.
One final note, safelists have been around for a long time. Some
say they are becoming obsolete, others say not so fast. So, I'll
leave that up to you.
Note: This is my personal opinion-I feel safelists offer a
great method of filling up your email box rather quickly. But with
minimal results.
Submit to Link Farms
Many people have placed their links into link farms. Link Farms
were a 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. Ouch!
Paid Linking-Follow the Google
Rules
Linking has it's pluses and minuses, as you will soon see. Paying for links
on a high ranking site, at one time, was a viable way to increase page rank.
However, since Google has been coming down hard on paid links-whether
you were the site receiving or the site paying for the link-you
should realize that you could see a lowering of rank for your web
page or site. My advice, you should be aware of the Google rules before you make a decision to pay for links,
it could cost you your business if Google decides you have crossed
the line.
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, if you don't follow the
rules, do you want to be de-listed from Google after you have
put a lot of sweat and tears in your online business?. the decision
is yours.
|
Subscribe in a reader