There is no word in the English language that catches interest like FREE. Oh there are others that tantalize but free stuff just makes us do the goofiest things. We bring home free gimmicky things all the time that we know we’ll hardly use, but do it regardless, and then try to pawn it off for $0.05 at a yard sale in the spring.
They say the finest things in life are free: love, friends, know-how, but rarely in life does free stuff offer any true worth, as in products and services. Well, in the web based arena, that is not consistently true, especially in web page promotion. It’s because what is free of cost to you is offering value to the individual giving it away.
So listen up entrepreneurs on a tight budget, because here are Five (5) FREE Ways to Market Your Website:
1) Online Directories
Search for free business directory sites and see what turns up. Tons, and I mean tons, of websites that enable you to list your company or website for absolutely zero cost. Why? Because their financial models are usually hinged upon the up-sell, read that, the prime listing.
Oh you get the fundamentals free of charge, but what you actually prefer is the one that lets you post images, videos, and the longer, expanded version summary. The terrific part is, nearly all of the free versions will list your website link, and this helps people discover you and your online back-link method. Here are a few of the more popular directories:
And let’s not lose sight of the search engine wars that trigger thousands of complimentary, unclaimed listings for companies like:
Does it take time to fill out their listing questionnaires? Youbetcha! It’s free of cost, but not effortless.
2) No-Cost Press Release Services
Have a new product or service you wish to get recognized? Write a press release and get it submitted via a PR service that, like the directories, provides free fundamental press release submittal services.
These typically won’t arrive at the big media outlets; most utilize sites like PR Newswire or Business Wire, but the middle tier media outlet industry can be reached by PR services with cost-free solutions, like…
3) Social Media Sites
If you are seeking to get reach on the internet and you don’t have a Facebook profile, LinkedIn account, Google+ page and Twitter account, tsk tsk tsk! All of these provide completely free listings on websites with incredibly high Google page ranks. They’re the biggest social media websites on the web.
If you have a business you can also get a business page on these sites that connects to your individual profile. Although you don’t have free time to “operate” these websites to their fullest, there is link juice provided from even the most horrible fan pages.
A superior method is to get in the social media arena and select one or two of these to construct sites and begin a communication with others who are currently at ease using this vehicle.
And there are hundreds of supplementary social sites for headlines, bookmarking and the like that enable you to acknowledge your website if not get a posting. A sound listing of more of them than you can possibly deal with can be located at Shareaholic.
4) Comments
You and I both know there is way too much free info on the web, but we still have a few preferred blogs or news websites we visit to get our fill of self-help or what’s happening in the spheres that we are interested in.
So do others who may want to go to your blog. On almost all blogs, you can leave comments. The blog writers enjoy this because it alerts the search engine world and new followers that people are participating in their content, and nothing damaging can come from that.
When you write a comment, you’ll usually have the possibility to attach your website link to your reply. Often you can link to other things to as a possibility, like your Facebook or Twitter profiles.
Do it. If you reserve 30 minutes a week, you can scan recent posts from your favored sites and post relevant (key word) comments on them. Over time, the value of your understandings joined with the link-back to your website will produce traffic and SEO power.
5) Your Email Sign-Off
This is the easiest free method I know of to get people to a website, and the one that is incredibly most often ignored. Every email you send must have a standard footer that describes you. It generally has a name, title or something appealing about you, and some way to connect with you.
It ought to also have your site hyperlinked or any other site you may want to send people to, such as a LinkedIn page. You can use a text anchor link, like Visit us for your San Diego SEO, or write out the link starting with http so it reads http://www.yourlink.com and will show up in text-based e-mail browsers and a live link in most email programs. Emails are often forwarded, copied, and otherwise shared. You don’t know who is reading and clicking.
Free stuff is normally worth what you shell out for it: nothing, but making use of these 5 techniques, Free Website Marketing is alive and well. Use the gadgets available, add a smidgen of energy and effort, and get your blog seen.
About Karl
Karl Walinskas is the CEO of Smart Company Growth, a business development firm that helps small to mid-size professional service firms build competitive advantage in an online world of sameness. His Smart Blog covers leadership, business communication, sales & service, online marketing and virtual business, and was recently named by Buyerzone as one of the Top 20 Business Blogs of 2011. He is the author of Getting Connected Through Exceptional Leadership, has been a featured expert for Inc.com with articles published in Selling Power, America Online,and Site Pro News to name a few, and blogs frequently for Rank My Website, a top San Diego SEO Services firm.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Karl:
Great article on quick and simple ways businesses can get more exposure online. I would just add one other very important online directory to your list – Yelp. With Apple Maps coming on board in the fall with the integration of Yelp, and with iPhone commanding about 25% of the smartphone market, small businesses will not want to ignore this directory.
Travis Van Slooten
Nowadays, there’s many ways to promote your website for free that real work from internet. When you expose your business to internet especially the social media sites, It a lot chances to discover you a have a more visitors.
Great advices! I’m running a blog about making money with a website (in spanish) and I found your blog looking for tips for promotion. Good work! Thanks.
Nice tips! We are working for the promotion of our webs and wanted to improve by free press releases. I will visit some of your recommendations.
Thanks for this tips, im trying to positionig my website, but its too hard for me.
I agree with the idea of using free of charge ways.. It works even better than charged ways
Thanks for the tips, i want to promote my site and mi ideas, but somethimes i don’t have money and this really helps.
Great post. I may add the following.
1) Forum comments. Find the most active forums in your niche and participate daily.
2) Guest post on other bigger blogs to benefit from the link and the audience
3) After the articles in your blog got indexed by google. Submit them to article directories for more backlinks and exposure.
4) Answer questions in site like : Yahoo answers, Google answers, wiki answers, askville “Amazon” with a backlink to your website
5) Paywithatweet: People pay with a tweet to download a content in your website such as an ebook. Results in more exposure for you
6) Youtube: Make a useful youtube video and add the proper tags to it and an awesome description and it should do exceptionally well in Google search results. People would view the video and then navigate to your website through the link you provide in the description “don’t forget about that”
Thank you. Hope that I added value to this awesome community : )
-Mohamed
I’m new to SEO and PR and this article helped me out a lot. Thank you for the tips and insights.
Hey there this is kind of of off topic but I was wondering
if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML.
I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding knowledge so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Musick School – WordPress uses a WYSIWYG editor for creating pages and posts, so you don’t need to know HTML to create new pages on your blog or website.
I was recommended this blog by my cousin. I am not sure whether this post is written by
him as no one else know such detailed about my difficulty.
You’re incredible! Thanks!
Nice tips!