Promoting your business on the internet is a never ending process.
You cannot afford to place some advertisements and then sit
back to watch the results roll in. To do so would doom your
business to failure. Instead, each day, you need to be doing
something to promote your business.
So what are some of the things you could be doing each day
to promote your business? I will run through some ideas for
you. This is not a complete list – just some ideas to
get you started.
Write An Article.
A great way to demonstrate your expertise and to entice people
to your web site is to write an article and submit it to various
newsletters. Ensure that you choose newsletters your prospective
customers are likely to be reading. Ensure that at the end of
your article is a resource box that refers the reader to your
site or your ezine.
Place Some Free Classified Ads
Look for places where you can place some free classified ads.
A good place to start is the classified ads at Yahoo. This is
a high traffic site that is well worth posting to. If you don’t
get responses to your ad on Yahoo – then it is likely
that you won’t get results anywhere else also. So spend
the time to get your ad right on Yahoo before trying other places.
Test and test and test until your ad is pulling responses on
Yahoo. Then place it in other free classified ad sites.
Invite Referrals
Amend your site or add to your ezine a request that your visitors
refer your site to their friends. If you don’t ask people
to do this, they usually won’t. It doesn’t take
much to add this request. MasterRecommend is a CGI Script that
is worth having a look at and testing on your site. More details
can be found at: http://www.willmaster.com/master/
Work on one of your web pages to make it search engine
friendly
Review one of your web pages to ensure that it is key word
rich and attractive to the search engines. A useful tool to
assist you with this is WebPosition Gold. For more details on
this software, please visit: http://www.roibot.com/w.cgi?R379_WPG.
Once you have improved your page, resubmit it to the search
engines using WebPosition Gold.
Add Interesting Content
Add a new page to your website that contains content that your
visitors will be interested in reading. Ensure that the page
is submitted to the search engines also. This page could be
an article you wrote for your ezine (or other ezines) or something
topical that your visitors will find useful. Again, demonstrate
your expertise and through this work on building trust with
your visitors. Trust will translate into orders for your product
or service.
Bid On Some Keywords
Pay-per-click search engines allow advertisers to bid on certain
keywords. The advertiser pays for the traffic sent to their
site. For example, if you have a health business and your best
key words are "low fat diet", then you can bid on
these words. If no-one else has set up bids on these words,
you may be able to bid as low as $0.01 (subject to which search
engine you are using) – therefore, for each visitor they
send you, you pay one cent each.
The best pay-per-click search engine available is overture.com
– they provide a very good service, have the largest audience
and are worth checking out. For details on other pay-per-click
search engines, visit: http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com
Look For Reciprocal Link Opportunities
Spend a little time looking for places where you can request
reciprocal links. These are almost as effective as the search
engines in providing free targeted traffic to your web site.
Consider sites where you can have your articles appear with
a link to your site. Be creative in your thinking and don’t
just search for opportunities to trade links. Don’t be
afraid to ask for other sites to recommend your site to their
visitors.
Review Your Banner Ads
Is there any way that you can improve the click through rate
of your banner ads? Consider the design of your banner. Test
some improvements and see what difference they make. Look for
ways that you can improve the targeting of your banner. Maybe
even look at changing banner exchanges or joining an additional
banner exchange that could provide you with better targeting
opportunities.
The ideas I have discussed above are just some of the things
you can do to continually promote your business on the internet.
It is important to remember that you need to be doing something
everyday to promote your business. This list should help you
get started
