Sunday, October 26, 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.

You can submit articles to hundreds if not thousands of article directories that will help you promote your business. These articles will also help brand you as an expert in your field. Articles can be used to help you get search engine rankings as well.

Google has local listings as well that you can submit your business information to. The options to submit your site will include rankings for regionally specific keywords such as "Salt Lake City plumber" which will include your listing along with other plumbers in that same area. You may be surprised to find that if you're listed as a local business elsewhere, your information may already be included. If not, you can always add it and also customize it to include a link to your website as well.

Another service similar to the local listings is Google base which is Google's way of creating listings of events, products, photos, and just about anything else that people submit. This is a great way to get your products to show up in Google's search listings. It doesn't cost anything to list in Google Base and also has options for uploading spreadsheets.

Online classified ad websites such as Craigslist are great ways to get the word out about new products, new events, products for sale and can be a great way to list regionally specific sales as well. One strategy that works great for online classifieds is a coupon code that can be used on a website or printed out and brought into a store. People tend to respond to offers where there is a "special" deal or even a perceived deal.

Social networking is best described as communicating and "networking" with other like-minded people on the internet. There's a lot more than I can even pretend to get into with only a few sentences. Spending time on sites like youtube.com, digg.com, facebook.com and several sites like this represent probably the most frequently visited social networking sites on the internet. Sites that facilitate the interaction between individuals through commenting, blogging, posting, instant messaging, etc. would be considered "Web 2.0" sites.

Part of social networking is blogging and one of the central ideas around blogging is to initiate a "conversation" which is why blogs have commenting options. Individuals can comment on blogs and usually with a link back to their own website. Finding blogs related to the topics where your business can be promoted is as easy as searching for them on the search engines. In fact, Google has their own blog search engine at blogsearch.google.com

There are several things you can do to get traffic to your website and if you're wiling to spend the time, you can get a lot of traffic for free. These are only a few of the methods that I use. - 15431

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