There are so many different ways
to promote any business both online and offline. The real difference between these
two areas of marketing is how each one gets targeted visitors to your online business.
Offline advertising through magazines and newspapers is extremely profitable
to most online businesses. However, the same is not always the case for online
advertising. There are effective online ad methods such as pay per click engines,
classified ads, etc. But the real key to success through online promotion involves
creating rich content. People are on the web with questions that need answers,
unless your products or services can answer their questions sales will not come
so regularly.
There are some important steps you can implement in your
business that will create a powerful content strategy for you as well as create
an effective and useful marketing strategy. This will take some time each week,
but even with as little as 30 minutes a day you can be well on your way.
1.
Search Engine Optimization
Optimizing
your site for the search engines means creating keyword rich
content, exchanging
links with other relevant websites, submitting your site to online directories,
all which create strong backlinks pointing to your site.
Having relevant
backlinks pointing at your site will get your site "spidered" more often by major
search engine like google. This will then move you up in natural search placement
as your site becomes more and more optimized.
Submission to directories
is a great way to increase the amount of "spider" views and hits your website
received. Submit to
www.alexa.com
to ensure improved rank as well as view all sorts of traffic stats for your site
and your competitors.
Keeping your site rich in relevant content and
having strong keyword meta tags is an important part of SEO.
2.
Articles Utilizing free articles is also one of the most valuable
free promotion methods to develop rich content and increase your websites targeted
traffic. Writing articles brand you as a trusted expert in your niche area of
writing and create quality content for your site that search engines love.
If you don't know where to start or simply don't want to do the writing yourself
you can always include other people's content rich articles on your web page.
This is completely legal assuming the articles are unedited and the author resource
box is intact unedited.
Some major article directories are:
When
writing your own articles, keep in mind that article directories do not accept
spam. Do not simply write about your own products or services, write about topics
that would be important and useful to a wide range of web users. Then include
affiliate or website links in your own resource box. This is a great way to build
your web sites credibility as well as increase quality content.
3.
Press Release Similar to articles but also different, press
releases are a great way to build rich content and increase targeted web traffic
to your site. A press release is news about your business or website that is then
posted on popular online news sources. Create them similar to articles with rich
content and then submit them to some major press release directories, many of
which have a high traffic rank and thousands of daily and weekly visitors.
Some great press release resources you can use are:
4. Blog RSS Feeds
Creating content rich blogs is a great way to increase your websites traffic
and content. Utilizing RSS feeds is a great way to easily distribute your blogs
content to other web sources.
RSS is confusing to most web users who
don't really know what it is or how it is used. RSS is a form of coding that can
be added to any website or blog. What the coding does is update itself with relevant
content regularly. So if you have an RSS feed on your webpage of blog there will
be constant content updates with relevant information. Due to the self-updating
your web page receives increase search engine position and increased spider traffic.
When your blog is complete and you have updated the content several times,
be sure to "ping" the blog to some major sources. "Pinging" will increase your
traffic from web users and web spiders. The two most commonly used sites are:
5.
Free Ebooks and Resources By creating free ebooks and reports
and then offering them to your visitors, you create incentives for return visits
and increased traffic. Fill the eBooks with quality relevant information about
whatever topic you are writing about, but most importantly fill the eBooks with
your own affiliate links.
Even submit your ebooks and reports to some
major ebook directories for increased traffic and popularity.
Increase
the incentive to get your ebooks by making them viral. This means that other people
can input, or brand, their own affiliate and website links into your ebook and
then offer it to others themselves. This increases the traffic and users you have
to your eBook offer.
After you have implemented these rich content strategies
add other sources of income to your web pages. Utilize free incomes like Google
Adsense or the yahoo equivalent. These place relevant ads onto your site which
are constantly being updated, increasing the amount of search engine spiders you
receive, and they
are an additional source of income to you, even if small.
6.
Drive Traffic, attract New Customers
Online
advertising such as pay per clicks can be extremely effective in promoting your
website. However the costs can become too high for the type of traffic and amount
of sales you are generating. By focusing on creating quality content for your
website, and then promoting that content, you can continue to drive targeted traffic
to your site for free for a long time. The most powerful and profitable website
are those which turn up with high placement on natural, unpaid, search engine
searches.
