Thursday, November 13, 2008

How To Get Your Website Promoted For Free

By Brian Armstrong

There are a lot of ways that you can leverage the internet to promote your website or even your physical location. I'll be writing about a few of these methods in this article.

Article marketing is a great way to get traffic. I'm practicing what I'm preaching here by using articles to promote my own websites and services. There are a lot of benefits to using articles, not the least of which is that you'll be able to brand yourself as an expert in your niche or field. This generates credibility and ultimately more sales for your products or services if you leverage this resource in the right way. I find that for every 100 people that view my article, about 7-8 of them will click through to my website that is linked at the bottom of each article.

Google has a service where it will list the local businesses in a specific geographic area based on searches as well. For instance, if you searched for "Salt Lake City plumber", you'll get a list of plumbers including a map listing of where those plumbers are located in SLC. Inclusion in this directory is free if you meet the criteria. This is a great way to get a number 1 listing in Google for a regionally specific keywords.

Google has yet another service that is very friendly to merchants which is their database of events, products, services, and just about anything else you can think of. This database is a huge source of product listings that merchants and use to submit their products, services and pricing along with relevant links back to product pages of their websites or appropriate contact information.

Craigslist and other online classified ad websites can help also with generating traffic to your business or your physical location. These classified ad websites can get some significant traffic and I've used them many times to both list items for sale as well as purchase services. Coupon codes work very well on these sites because people are more likely to visit a site knowing that they have some "secret" coupon code for a certain percent off, or free shipping, or a flat dollar off coupon.

If you've heard of Facebook or MySpace, then you've heard of social networking websites. As much as most of these sites are meant to keep people in touch and connected, these can also be leveraged as means of networking with other business owners or customers that may also be able to get value from your products and services.

Another way to get traffic to your site is to comment on other people's blogs. This works the best when you have blogs that get a lot of comments and posts that get a lot of views. Adding a comment that provides insight and adds value to the original message will get people more interested in what you have to say on your website which will create traffic to your site, and depending on the blog will also create some search engine optimization benefits and help you with your website's ranking.

You can develop any number of different strategies for getting traffic back to your website. The most important part of any of these strategies is to be consistent. - 16651

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