Thursday, November 6, 2008

How To Get Your Online Advertising 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.

If you have a retail business, you can get your business details listed in local directories including both Google and Yahoo which have "local" listings and based on the search will generate a listing usually at the very top of the search engines. For instance, if you search for "Salt Lake City plumber", you'll get a list of plumbers, their contact information. You can submit your own business information so that you have local traffic to your site or store.

Google base is another method of generating leads and traffic to either your website or your retail store. Google base is basically like a big database of all kinds of things including products, events, and any number of other "listings".

You can use Craigslist.org as well to list items for sale, events, such as a sale that your business is having or even products, or things like a coupon code that you can use to get other people to your business or website to buy your product. In my experience, coupon codes work very well on classified ad sites.

Social networking has grown significantly in the last few years online and you may have heard of this as "Web 2.0". You can use a lot of these social networking sites to develop contacts who can benefit from your products and services. Just like the name implies, however, you'll need to network with other people. The benefit to you if you're a bit more on the shy side, or not usually extroverted, the internet provides a bit of a buffer and will allow you to get out there and form some relationships and get some additional business to your website.

Blog commenting is another way to get some traffic to your site. I personally will read several blogs per week or month and depending on the conversation, I'll contribute or also if the comment provides especially good value or insight, I'll usually click through and find new websites this way. People are doing this all the time and your comments will also generate traffic to your sites. Find blogs that typically get multiple comments on any given post and use those for traffic by leaving good comments and adding value to the conversation.

There are dozens of ways you can get free traffic to your website or ways that you can leverage the online world to drive traffic to your physical store as well. These are just a few of the many ways that this can be done. The main thing that is required for long term success is consistency. If you aren't consistent with these methods, you won't gather enough data to find out what works and what doesn't work. If you don't know that, you're spinning your wheels.

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