The Internet is made up of 10,000,000 pages of text, with over 7.3 million pages being added every day. Without an aggressive promotion program, your site will disappear in the crowd. But don’t worry, there are many different things you can do to get the traffic you want that require varying levels of time and energy.
Start with the simplest thing first. Listing your site on search engines is always your initial step. You can do this easily with sites like http://www.AddMe.com. On AddMe.com you can list your site on about 14 search engines at no cost. For a fee of between $30 and $50, they will list your site once on about 1,200 search engines, newsgroups and other similar places.
Your next step is to list your website address onto everything that people will see. This includes flyers, booklets, advertising, product labels, business cards, signs, press releases, phone book listing, invoices and your after-hours answering machine message. A simple message, like “We’re sorry we missed you, but to find out more about our company visit our website at www.OurBusiness.com.”
If you can write articles, you have an excellent way to promote your website. All you have to do is write short articles, about 300 to 500 words, covering topics of interest to people who visit your site. Then post these articles on your website and on free articles sites. I live in Arizona, but my articles have appeared in publications, ezines and websites all over the world. Because of this, I’ve had clients from all over the country, including New York, New Jersey and Little Rock, Arkansas. I even have an e-mail auto responder set up on each article page so that people who want to use the article can have it automatically e-mailed to them. It’s always nice to have my articles help others, and in turn to have others promote my business. If you want to list articles on free article sites, try these.
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.goarticles.com
https://murdok.org/submit.html
http://www.netterweb.com/articles
There are many other sites like this out there, just Google for “free articles site.”
Viral marketing is a good way to promote your site too. These Tell-A-Friend promotions have been around for a long time, but with the advent of e-mail, it’s now easier than ever. A great way to do this is to offer free e-cards on your site. Someone sends a card to a friend, but the friend must visit your site to pick up the card, where they are encouraged to send a card of their own. People love sending cards for free, and in return they gladly promote your site. Another option is to have one or more ebooks or reports on your site with interesting information that people can download for free. In the ebook, you tell people to pass it along to any of their friends while including information about your site.
You can also try affiliate programs. These are programs where you have a product or service, someone else promotes it on their site, and you pay them a commission for every referral or sale they give you. These can be tricky, as you need a program to track the referrals. There are different companies that offer tracking programs for businesses, just be sure to check them out well. This allows your products, services and website to be promoted by others.
By far, the best way to promote your business is through customer loyalty. You can do this in an unlimited number of ways. Some travel sites will send e-mails to clients containing information about their destination, like weather, discounts and interesting sites. You can offer a regular e-mail newsletter, advice on a bulletin board, useful links or anything else you think your customers would find useful.
Every business must market itself, especially on the Internet. So try the marketing techniques you think will work best for your site. Whatever you decide to do, keep reevaluating your marketing techniques to be sure what you’re doing works for you.
http://www.CreativeCauldron.com
Jeff Colburn is a website designer and writer. His goal is to make the process of creating or updating your website easy and simple for you, while creating a website that meets all your needs and expectations. Jeff can also create all of the copy for your website.
To see a sample of Jeff’s work go to The Creative Cauldron. It’s an award winning site filled with information for writers, photographers, artists and other creative people.
Copyright 2004 Jeff Colburn
