Boost Your Business With Free Web Promotion

Whether you are starting a new business or operating on a budget, you cannot go wrong with free web promotion. The truth is that not everyone has an expense account to justify an aggressive advertising campaign. Many businesses, especially web-based, outline marketing as their largest expense. However, free web promotion has changed the way that everyone looks at advertising.

The best way to gain free web promotion is through the use of press releases, which highlight upcoming news, events and headlines regarding your company. In order to write an effective press release, your business must be involved in something noteworthy. Whether it be a contest, a grand opening, a special sale or other event, a press release is the perfect way to advertise your business happenings for free. There are a number of press release submission websites, which allow business owners to submit their news for free. In addition, submitting your press release to newspaper and magazine editors may increase your chances of being published both online and in print. Before sending a press release, which should be no more than one page in length, make sure that your name, mailing address and telephone number is included at the top of the page. Many editors require that contact information be present before they will even consider publishing a press release. The reasoning behind this is to confirm the identity of the person submitting the news.

Web promotion can perhaps best be utilized through successful positioning on internet search engines. By making sure that your website content is rich with information, links and updated information, search engines will be more likely to position your site among the top ranks. In addition, a descriptive website will also find it’s way to the top. For example, if your business deals with collectibles, make sure that your content is rich in keywords dealing with collectibles and the product line that you offer. Avoid stuffing keywords, but make sure that your website clearly indicates it’s subject matter.

One of the best avenues for web promotion is through article marketing. While many website owners are still somewhat unfamiliar with this approach, others are cashing in on a surge of traffic generated from properly marketing their articles. The key to successful web promotion via article marketing is to write an informative article that everyone will want to read. At the bottom of the article, include a brief paragraph featuring your name, the name of your business and a website address. The next step is to submit your article to as many article directories as possible. The more exposure, the better. As other webmasters log on to article directories in search of content for their website, they may select your article to be featured on their site. The more webmasters that feature your work, the more free web promotion your business will receive.

There are a number of ways to acquire paid marketing opportunities and an equal, or greater, number of ways to get free web promotion. If done correctly, web promotion doesn’t have to empty the entire expense account. In some cases, it won’t even cost you a cent.

Do It Big. Get Noticed.

Whatever you do in business, do it big! There’s no other arena in which those words are truer than the internet. It’s a competitive world wide web, and you do have to find your niche. But once you find that niche, do it just a little bit different than everybody else. Do it big. People don’t often think in those terms. So if you are able to put yourself in that mindset, then you’ll be ahead of the pack.

You can struggle all you want trying to get your website to the top of the search engines, but by the time you get there, the rules for getting there will have changed. You can spend countless hours trading links with other websites, but you’ll find that many of those will soon ditch their domain. You may consider any number of online strategies for getting your website noticed, but the bottom line is somebody on the other end always wants to get paid.

This is when the idea of “do it big” comes into play. Let me explain. I recently discovered a website owned by a woman from the UK. Her product was original art. Specifically, cartoon-like pencil sketches. Her intention was to put her work on shirts, stationary, and greeting cards and to sell it through her website. The problem was she couldn’t get her site noticed. She had no visitors.

How many times have you lamented over the lack of visitors to your site? I have, and I do. It doesn’t matter how many visitors a site receives. It never seems to be enough. We are insatiable. But you can struggle with online strategies, or you can do something big offline. Here’s what I suggested to the woman from the UK.

Start a campaign. Call it the “loan a shirt” campaign or something of that nature. The idea would be to take a shirt featuring the artwork, and send it around the world. How? She or somebody else would wear it for a day and then pass it on to another person who would do the same. This would continue for any duration of time. But the goal would be to send the shirt around the world, and each person who wore the shirt for a day could log on to the site if they choose and fill out a quick location form so the shirt may be tracked.

It’s such a simple, low-cost idea, but it’s a creative way to expose a website as the address would be listed right there on the shirt. And people who wore the shirt for a day would get to see and sample the product first hand. It could even be an event for charity, and an effective press release would be the only invitation the media would need to get involved.

But what if somebody decided not to pass the shirt on? What if somebody stole it? What if the shirt got lost? What if “this”, and what if “that”?

Hey, what if it worked? What did it cost? Nothing. It only required a little creative thinking. A person could do anything they wanted with the idea in order to eliminate every negative “what if”.

The point I’m trying to make is we don’t often think of doing something big offline to promote ourselves online. And it doesn’t have to be costly. It doesn’t have to even follow what we believe to be the traditional rules of advertising. Just think big, do it big, and get noticed. After all, isn’t that the goal? Or is the goal just to advertise?