Posted by Israel Rothman on Jun 11th, 2010 | 4 comments
It is no longer important that you have a large budget, are tech savvy, or have been in business for long: if you know what to do, there are many ways to promote yourself online in ways that are free or so inexpensive that they cash-flow; here are ten of them:
10 ways to increase traffic to your website | Free or under 100 dollars:
- Have your own blog and an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) that originated at your website (domain) – this makes you the source of the information – you can setup an account at hostgator.com for almost nothing that will allow you to install, for instance, WordPress, or any other open source (IE: free) CMS (content management system) for free with the push of a button.
- Let the world know the blog is there – this is very inexpensive: if you let the robots know that you want your pages indexed (use all-in-one SEO plug-in for WordPress) you can be found under organic search, and there are several other things to do:
- Submit the site to the top 50 or so search engines and directories – this is different from what it used to be: a robotic submission is not good enough: this stuff is free but somebody who understands the semantic web needs to do this manually and well to get traffic and good links.
- Get into local search, Google places..These places, Like Bing local search and Google places, are still free (although I do not think it will stay that way for long) – it is important to fill out these profiles and ‘places’ well to create the best possible anchor text links back to your mother site (your blog) you can pay $30 to do this at UBL.org, but I recommend that you have a professional help you maximize the way the data is submitted and maintained, the is the simplest, most effective free advertising available today.
- Use video - in the LA area, or if it can be done remotely or with staff actors, we do professionally edited video for as little as $300, and everyone can do video with their phone. Google mixes video results in worth the regular results, and, if your video is optimized properly (META data) it will appear on key word searches with a thumbnail (huge!) you can embed videos that are on YouTube in the pages or posts and on the front page of your website, even use the HD version we provide to inexpensive cable TV ads. We have done several lately where the website video serves the purpose also for television advertising. Any sustainable solution will include some video marketing.
- Post to groups, forums, social media sites – these sites get lost of traffic and have page rank. By posting carefully split original posts from your blog (see above) with links to read the rest at your blog, you can build traffic and links to your website. You can find these related, specifically niche groups all over the web, including but not limited to linkedin.com, Yahoo.com, Google.com, Live.com, facebook.com, biznik.com meetup.com and thousands of others: by joining the groups for free you often gain instant access to their entire mailing list, sometimes in the thousands, and/or a bulletin or idea board that reaches everyone.
- Post partial posts as above on industry related blogs and magazines, post comments: “related article here” etc. to build traffic and links.
- Hire someone to do some ‘spreading around’ on your behalf – we can have a good article , post, or partial article or contest, survey or other offer posted on the top 100 key-word-specific related sites .
- Issue free press releases – there is a reason why every major PR firm or large company does this. Of course nobody cares that some stranger got promoted: fortunately, thought, news organizations are always starved for news to print: by treating your press releases as news, they fill space, and you get free advertising. There are definitely people who still read the newspaper, and some of them are good clients.
- Join a Business Barter Exchange – mine will start you off with a 1000 dollar line of credit – you may not have thought about this, but even if you never do one single barter transaction, joining the group is the least expensive, most cost effective way to reach thousands of businesses instantly: you can set your own rules, and only accepts a portion of the commissions on barter, for instance, but you still get the calls and the exposure. There are actually people who buy and sell actual property completely on barter. My group is MYTRADEAMERICA.com which is hooked into dobarter.com the worlds largest network of inter-connected barter brokers with common currency. If you join MYTRADEAMERICA.com be sure to enter that you were referred by me, and your initiation fee will be $95 instead of the customary $295 (I do not need to make money off of barter LOL)
It has been my experience that the articles that feed me best are the ones like this with real and free information. Please share your tips here.
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Amazing Site!
Traffic generation is the main service a social media marketing service can provide. A link-sharing site enables users to share links to content on other websites. When you begin looking into social media marketing services, you will find that there are several different tactics that will hep you to benefit with your main business. The services that are offered should provide you with basic brand building through the different portals.
I just updated this
Like your suggestion on joining a barter exchange (btw, your links to mytradeamerica.com are 404ing)…have been thinking about it recently, but never have belonged to one before. I’m guessing you use it as a cash alternative for SMBs when offering your web services?? Would be interested to hear more about how you utilize it in parallel to your core business. Thanks!
Yea, we use the barter we take to pay for main stream advertising to get cash clients.