There are lots of ways in which you can get your business running on the internet for free. Your success would be a combination of all the aspects explained in this article along with your persistence and hard work. If you are looking for instant exposure and have no issues paying through the nose then just open a pay per click account. But if you want to drive endless quality traffic to your website free of cost then read on. When you implement such tactics the search engines are also be more likely to pick up on your website and would list it in the organic search results which have a proven record of sending more traffic with a higher conversion rate than PPC.
1.) Writing articles. 2.) Writing press releases. 3.) Blogging. 4.) Forum signatures. 5.) Podcasts. 6.) Making and publishing video 7.) Viral marketing.
Writing ezine articles is one of the best ways to promote your online business however your articles in order to be successful must be both of an informative nature and not seem to promote your business directly, there is nothing worse than searching for information on the internet and having somebody trying to ram there business down your throat. You must seem to promote yourself as a knowledgeable body on the internet and not a sales person trying to make a sale. You can of course promote your business through the article signature for example if I was writing an article on how stay at home parents could earn extra money from the internet then I might have a clickable link at the end of my article that says something like "come and see how I make money as a stay at home mom." Some ezine sites do have their own coding for doing such signatures and may differ from site to site. If your website has more information on the subject that you are already writing about in your ezine then you may be able to direct link to that website or you may link to your blog that has more information, and then from your blog to your website would be acceptable. With most ezine article sites you have the choice to be a free member or you can subscribe. A monthly subscription will of course get your articles published a lot faster but if you are writing a lot of articles, which in order to be successful you should be doing, then when you have a constant stream of articles being published over a say a 10 day period then I personally would stick to the free membership at least until you have fine tuned your writing technique.
Writing press releases is a more direct way of advertising your online business. It is possible to keep people up to date with recent events in your business such as developments in products or changes made to your website or you can use press releases in the same way as you use articles to give away valuable content to your readers on related topics to your business. Pressexposure.com, is one of the best press release sites and is fairly relaxed in the rules of self promotion, it only takes a day or two to get your work reviewed and published.
Blogging is a great way to promote yourself, your site and your business. If you can make your blog interesting enough and full of great content then people will subscribe to your blog and become followers of your work. A blog site can also be of great value to you the more visitors you get, the higher the traffic the more value your blog site will become and you can sell advertising space on that blog which creates a nice residual income and it does of course open a gateway to your main website. Good video content also has a place on your blog it is easy enough to publish a video on youtube.com and simply use the embedding code to place that video on your blog, it doesn't even have to be your own work you can embed any video that displays an embedding code just make sure it is of relevance.
Forum signatures, as you know, can be used to create a link to your website as described in point 1. In ezine articles it is used to provide link to your domain without glaringly promoting yourself. You should enter a discussion forum only if you have a real pint to make. You should build an image of a person willing to help others. For that you have to read what queries others have posted. Then you can find answers to their questions and post them with your forum signature at the bottom of the post. I generally use a signature that just says from me to you and as I my business is about internet marketing, it is necessary on my part to pass relevant information to the readers. There are thousands of forums available as you know. But be careful to read the rules and regulations before making any posts as over promotion get your account closed without prior notification. If you join more forums.
Creating a promotional video for publishing over the internet is not as geeky as you may think. In fact with software like windows movie maker, that comes pre-installed with any PC with windows operating systems, the process is really simple. I have already written an article on making videos with windows movie maker Please visit this article to if you are really interested in video marketing. Videos are rated highly by Google and if you use the right publishing company you may attain the first page of Google in the organic search results within a few minutes of publication. Video publishing is easy nowadays as by using sites like and you can publish them in multiple sites at one go. They also cover Podcast publications of the same content which is discussed in the point 6 of this article.
Viral marketing is my favourite of the lot and Im going to give you a golden nugget of information here. If you have a look at the videos in youtube or any such site, you would also notice the number of views counter and the date it was posted. You would also notice that funny contents are among the most viewed ones there. For instance there was a well known video called Charlie bit me a few years ago about two baby brothers biting each other on the finger which was really funny and had over 62 million views in a very short span. Now imagine you have such a video with your URL mentioned at the bottom as a subtitle. How many of those 62 million viewers might type and open your website? Even if we consider 1% strike rate, you still have 620,000 potential customers. People also embed such videos into their blogs or forward them with mails or face book and other social networking sites. This is the origin of the nomenclature viral. It spreads like viruses! The generated traffic might be untargeted but still you get high amount of publicity and once you go viral then you can potentially gain lots from it. The easiest way to find content for viral marketing is to simply record a highly viewed programme from the television. I have had great results from programmes like Britains Got Talent and X Factor. Do you remember Paul Potts? When he sang for the first time, the video had over 10 million views in a week on youtube and it now has over 40 million. Just imagine the potential!
All these tactics are ongoing exercises and should be executed on a regular basis in order to see results. Make it a weekly task to do one of each, each week and you will soon start to see results.
No comments:
Post a Comment