Sunday 22 February 2009

Some Free Methods To Promote Your Website

"What are some free methods to advertise my site" is a question that comes up frequently in the forums, yahoo answers, askville and virtually any web 2 site visited by Internet marketing newbies.

So lets just go through a few of the free methods that actually work

On website

Factors You should implement on your web pages

Great content.

Nothing really beats this. You must have genuinely useful and unique content. I recently reviewed the website of an affiliate marketing beginner which was on [no surprise] making money on line. [I don't know why newbies seem to go for the Internet marketing niche. How can you teach it when you have yet to make any money with it?] Anyway this poor blokes site was so dull and just did not speak to me. You need to avoid making this error.

Master your topic, and generate great content on your site. There is no boycotting this crucial step. You may be wondering how having great content can attract visitors. it's all about search engine optimization. The more unique and useful and relevant your content is the better you will do in the search engines.

On page search engine optimization.

Again really important if you are going to get anywhere in the search engines. We are not talking here about invisible text or keyword stuffing or such black hat methods. The focus now is on naturally generated content and latent semantic indexing [LSI]. Read basics of on page SEO for more on this.

Visitor Participation.

In the current era of web 2, Internet users expect to be able to "have there say" on the majority of websites. Comment boxes are a goldmine for any website or blog. Apart from satisfying your visitor's need to be heard and have an opinion, your comments box has two really useful functions
  1. Ideas for new content. They tell you what they want to read about. Seems like good fodder for new posts
  2. Increased content. Doing well in the search engines is very much about content. Content on your pages and the content of the sites pointing to you. By allowing visitors to comment on your articles or posts you are naturally updating your content. How is that for updating your site without having to lift a finger.

Frequent Updates.

Be it a blog or a traditional website, the search engines want the pages with top ranking to have updated content. You need to go into your sites and update your content from time to time. Edit articles, add new posts, edit a profile.

No longer is it enough to build the site and then forget about it, while it continually generates money, hand over fist for you. Just does not happen these days.

An option to ensure that your websites have frequently updated content is to put an RSS feed on it. Feeds are frequently updated so it will appear that your site's content is being updated if part of it's content is via an RSS feed

Off your web site.

These are things you do elsewhere on the net to help increase the visibility of your website. Unfortunately there is so much focus on this that on site factors tend to get neglected

Back links.

These are links that point form other websites to pages on your site. The idea is to get as many back links as possible from relevant websites to boost your website's position in the search engine results pages [SERPs]. Again the higher your site is in the SERPs, the better your chances of getting free traffic from the search engines

Social bookmarking sites.

Our post on social bookmarking and niche marketing websites goes into some detail on this. But the short version is build a network on bookmarking sites and then submit your URL to these sites. The bigger and more targeted your network, the better the results

Free Classifieds.

Not a favorite of mine. The free classified sites are just over run with really poor quality ads. So one wonders what sort of people use them. At the end of the day you want to promote your site to people who are ready to buy. There are a few free classified sites that are worth looking into. They are Gumtree [if you are targeting a UK audience], Craig's list [probably the largest of it's kind], and USfreeads.

Free directories.

Directory submission has become less popular lately than it used to be. Questions have been raised about it's SEO value especially with regards to google. Having said that directory submissions are still a free and easy way to get word out there about your website. If it's a blog you are trying to promote, there are free blog directories online, just perform a google search

Blog participation.

This is not the same as blog spamming. The relevant word here is participation. Blogs are great for interaction because the majority of them allow readers to leave comments.The comment box often requires you to enter your name and email address. Some go further by inviting you to enter your website's address. This could result in a link to your site. This comment boxes are great for helping you build a reputation for your website.

Find blogs in your niche that have a large following and frequently participate in discussions [I have participated in a 200 comment discussion on one blog post recently] on these blogs. Be sure to make your comments factual and useful. Let readers of your comments get the feeling that you are someone who knows what you are talking about, an authority on the topic. Your own sites will soon get a reasonable readership based on the comments you have left on other blogs.

There is a ton of other methods you can use to promote your websites free but the handful described above should get you well on your way

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for your information sir. i saw your advice at associate program just now.

Candle Anne said...

You're right about the Social Bookmarking. You're Diggs always get me back to read your site. I need to work on more of that myself.

ami said...

Thanks Candle Anne :)