Online Business Promotion Tips
Author: Stephen Farrington
Directories are places where you can list your link to your website for free. You list your site under categories and headings so that people that are looking for a product or service can easily find you.
The great thing about directories for the online business owner is that you only have to do it once every six months or so and not every day or every week. The bad thing is that most traffic that you get to your site will probably not come from directories.
Even so it is a worth while task to do as it may generate some interest and as we know it often takes seven times for a prospect to seee your advert before they become interested.
Classified adverts are great and have been around since the beginning of newsprint. The problem is that you have to submit them regularly. It is important that you use some form of tracking for your URL so that you can discover which classified adverts are driving traffic and which are not.
This means that the tedious work or resubmitting these adverts will get less and less as you focus on the winning classigieds that make you the most traffic.
Articles are a great way to generate traffic and although they are time consuming they are great for putting what you have learnt in your online business pursuits onto paper. This often helps you learn the messages that are in the information that you are reading.
Many webmasters who don’t like writing articles will choose ones from elsewhere and put them onto their blog or website. If you get one of your articles chosen then this is another site that is offering you free advertising.
Submitting your URL to all the search engines is another effective and important way of promoting your website. You only need to do this once every three months or so as if you do it too much you may be branded as spam by the same search engine spifders that you are wanting to attract.
If you put you website onto the signature file when signing up to Forums it will be displayed everytime you make a post. You need to be careful with forums because people using them don’t like spam.
Look for topics that you are knowledgable about and make comments that are intelligent and focused.
Traffic exchanges are another great way to promote your product. You need a splash page as a front to your sign up or opt in page. The splash page should load quickly, be attractive, grab people’s attention and raise their curiosity.
You can surf for credits on traffic exchanges or you can purchase them. When you get going though you may find that you belong to five, six or even ten exchanges and buying credits can get expensive.
Many people will load four or five exchanges onto their browser at the same time and have them minimised when the counter is counting down while they open the next one.
Surfing like this for an hour a day can give you enough credit for as few days or even a week and so it just become another business task that you have to put in your diary.
Joining groups on facebook and other social networking sites has become another great way to get free advertising. Groups will often talk over a subject such as generating leads and traffic and then relate it to each of the different business models in the group. This can be a great learning experience for the new online business owner.
You can get free traffic from listing your service or product on directories, using classified adverts, writing articles, submitting your URL to search engines, commenting on forums, using traffic exchanges and adding value to groups on social networking sites.
You don’t have to do this all today but if you diary these tasks and do some of them every week your business can only get more exposure and generate better traffic.
Stephen Farrington is the CEO of Online Buzinezz that can be found at http://onlinebuzinezz.com having begun the long and arduous path to successful online business development Stephen has committed to helping others by writing about what he has learnt as he learns it.
