Top 10 Ways for Promoting a Website with Little to No Financial Investment

By Tom Klos

The key to succeeding with your Website is remembering that a Website does not replace other more traditional promotional efforts. It should complement them and work harmoniously with all online and offline marketing to promote whatever it is selling. A Website is not, in itself, a quick solution to business success, although nowadays it is integral. It should be remembered that just as in any other aspect of business, a lot of work and patience is required in order to make a Website work to its potential.

Now that we have been faced with the reality of marketing a Website, a site owner can do much in order to promote his online property with very little investment except for time. The following top 10 ways on promoting a business Website assume that you are starting with a clean and well-designed Website, whether it is only 1 page or 100, and that you have high confidence in the service(s) and/or product(s) you are selling.

An now the Top 10 ways for promoting a Website with little to no financial investment:

1. Put your Web address and email address on your business cards and promotional literature.
a. This way you encourage new prospects to visit your site. There isn't a better visitor than a prospect. Hint: not all visitors are prospects. In fact, most may be accidental visitors. So always be sure to introduce your site(s) to prospective clients. They may not buy anything after talking to you once, but repeated visits to your Website may convince them to make a purchase.

2. Get Email addresses from all of your contacts and make it a habit to always ask for email from every new contact made.
a. This way you will build an permission email list and avoid being accused of Spamming (i.e. sending unsolicited email). When someone you meet voluntarily gives you their email, this is a way saying "I give you permission to send me email."

3. Send out emails to your contacts periodically, whether to inform them of new services or products you offer, or to thank them for services/products purchased, or to send them greetings, or whatever other legitimate reason you can think of.
a. This is one of the most effective ways to keep your site fresh in the minds of prospects and to build a relationship that leads to sales.
b. Be careful not to abuse this privilege, though. That is, don't send out so much email that the person becomes annoyed.

4. Always have a "signature" at the bottom of your emails that includes your Web site address.
a. Duh!

5. Meet other business people? Do they have a Website? If so, then propose to exchange links with them.
a. Building a list of Websites that link to you will gradually increase your site's popularity on Search Engines such as Google.

6. Write articles on your area of expertise and allow other Websites to publish the article on their site free of charge as long as the author's (your) bio and link are included with the article.
a. You can post the articles on your Website and also on article distribution sites such as: http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm, http://www.ideamarketers.com/, and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network/

7. Add your site to the big 3 Search Engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Each offers a free site submit form.
a. Here are the links:
i. http://www.google.com/addurl/
ii. http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
iii. http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

8. Give away something of value for free on your Website.
a. If you offer something truly of value for free then this will create a buzz and get you more visits.

9. Visit Forums frequented by your target audience and be an active participant.
a. Be careful not to spam, though.
b. Always try to be helpful in your posts and remember to include link to your Website in your signature.
c. This will help you build a reputation as an authority in your field and receive positive traffic.

10. Write a Press Release and submit it to distribution services. Related to this is writing articles related to your field.
a. Many distribution services offer a free option such as: http://www.free-press-release.com/ and http://www.prweb.com/
b. Writing articles will help establish you as an authority in your field and when picked up by other websites will increase inbound links to your site.
c. It's hard to predict the reach of a single release or article. Over time, if it is well written, it may end up on hundreds of news and info sites.

If you follow these methods well enough and are patient, eventually you may be able to drop all other offline advertising and live solely on revenue generated through your site. Some companies have even been able to close the doors to their bricks-and-mortar stores because their online revenue was so great and now this is the only way they do business. But there are no short-cuts, unless you are willing to invest heavily financially.

For more information on how to drive traffic to your website visit Search Marketing Guide.

Tom Klos is a professional Web copy writer, marketer, and developer. Currently he's writing the Search Marketing Guide.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_Klos

Overall Picture In Website Traffic Increase

By SengAun Ong

I hope this article can ignite some other creative ways in your mind to increase targeted traffic for your website.

The mindset: People come to your website not because they are redirected to your website but because your website has the info that they are looking for at that point of time. Targeted traffic.

Three types of targeted traffic in my mind:

a) practical traffic (by continuously putting useful original content and avoid website mistake, then let the word of mouth takes over from there). This kind of traffic is long-term.
b) technical traffic (by using technical trick)
c) marketing traffic. Do seeding and let it grow.

Focus on practical traffic first before technical traffic and marketing traffic. Visits are the not the same with visitors. It is meaningless if by technical way you get thousands of visitors but they just come for one time and will not come anymore due to the poor and stagnant content of your website.

If your website is useful, the search engine will still list your website after their robots and spiders crawl to your website long enough even if you do not have time to do marketing. And the marketing starts from there by itself. It is just a matter of time. It does not matter if the number of visits is small as long as it is solid.

Temporarily when you do not have anything useful to add to your website, you can let your mind take a break and build up technical traffic and marketing traffic.

Technical traffic (these will not work if the content of your website is poor):

a) Submit URL to search engine. Do it yourself. Do not sign up with any submitter even it is free. And try search your URL in that search engine first before submitting to see if it has listed your website by itself.
b) Make your website search engine friendly.
c) Retain your visitors.
d) Make your web pages load faster. You and the people around you may be enjoying fast Internet but there are still a lot of people who are using dialup connection, especially in those countries that the communication market is monopolized.

To make your website search engine friendly (robots or spiders will crawl your website more frequently):

1) Continually add new content to your website. Your own forum can help in this.
2) No dead links in your website. Actually this is common sense and I do not have to say that right?
3) No outgoing link to any bad website.
4) Any word should be written in html. Picture words or flash words cannot be recognized by search engine.
5) Although a word is allowed to appear 3 times in the keywords meta tag, it is still better to avoid repetition because search engine does not like that.
6) Use popular keywords (that visitors may use to search the Internet) in the keywords meta tag. Of course the keywords must be related to your web page.
7) If you website contain many pages that have different content, the keywords meta tag should be customized according to the content of the page.
8) Description meta tag is not left blank and the description is related to the page. You may use the page title in the description meta tag if you do not what else to write.
9) Construct "robots.txt" file correctly so that the robots do not have to waste time crawling the unnecessary parts of your website.

To retain your visitors:

a) Create a forum for existing visitor to interact with each other.
b) Create a form for visitors to sign up for bi-weekly update reminder of your website.
Doing this will also encourage yourself when you see people signing up. c) RSS feed.
d) Custom a 404 error "page not found" page. You do not want to lose any visitor if somehow the page that the visitor wants to go cannot be found due to for example the mistake on the address that the visitor uses.

To make your pages load faster:

1) Do not use fancy feature like special way of page transition. You see no professional website uses that kind of thing. Remember that people go to Internet to find information, not to see your fancy feature.
2) Eliminate "whitespace" in your html codes. The mindset: to have no extra space, no indent (or tab) at all and as less lines (or returns) in html codes as possible without compromising readability. You should eliminate the whitespace manually without using any software because you know how is considered readable for yourself. But never touch the JavaScript because it may treat "return" differently.
3) Never put a table inside another table (nested table) and try not to make the whole page one big table.
4) Use cascading style sheet (CSS) if you do not always change the format of your pages.

Marketing traffic (all of these will not work if the content of your website is poor):

a) Tell your friends about your website. Create flyers to put in the mailboxes in the neighborhood or to bring along when you go out. Although the traffic generated by this is not significant but it will grow.
b) Let your URL appear as link on as many websites as possible.

To tell your friends about your website:

a) Send SMS.
b) Send email and forward funny stuff and include your URL. When your friends forward the funny stuff your send them, your URL will spread out. Also you may use your website email as your routine email. Some people may look out the website when they see your special email address. If any page of your website has universally useful content, you can even send the page link to everybody.
c) Online chat.
d) Post your personal profile online, such as on some friend list management websites.

Never suddenly write to people who do not know you yet about your website. That is called spamming.

To let your URL appear in as link on as many website as possible (this can be categorized under technical traffic too because robots have more ways to crawl in):

a) Write relevant and useful articles to submit to blog carnival and ezine.
b) Participate in discussion in relevant forum (preferably those which rank high on the search engines for the same popular keywords as yours) by giving useful comment.
People do not need you to just write "that's great", "well done", "interesting" etc there. c) Post testimonials for other websites in their websites.
d) Link exchange.

Two types of link exchange:

a) Link with the websites that rank high on the search engine result for the same popular keywords as yours.
b) Sign up with free link / visit exchange coordinator website. The weakness with this type of link exchange is other websites who sign up generally have the same amount of traffic like you so it may not help much. For the visit exchange some coordinators will not display your website if you do not let other member's website that comes out randomly to load in your browser. This will generate useless hits because members will just let the website load and skip. No targeted traffic. It is really boring that you need to view other people's website that does not suit to the things you are finding for that point of time.

Paid ad is essential for products only (especially seasonal or impulse products people look to buy in a particular period), not website. For example if you start to produce medium voltage switchgear and want to sell your product online, you cannot just rely on the word of mouth because there are not many people who know what medium voltage switchgear is.

SengAun Ong http://tipskey.com/ Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=SengAun_Ong