Sunday, October 26, 2008

How To Get Free Online Advertising

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.

Articles like this one are great means of getting traffic to a website and also an easy means of getting your business contact information out to the masses. Assuming you produce good content, there is no shortage of opportunities to get your articles published and read. Be sure to have a strong call to action.

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.

Another service similar to the local listings is Google base which is Google's way of creating listings of events, products, photos, and just about anything else that people submit. This is a great way to get your products to show up in Google's search listings. It doesn't cost anything to list in Google Base and also has options for uploading spreadsheets.

Craigslist and other online classified ad websites can help also with generating traffic to your business or your physical location. These classified ad websites can get some significant traffic and I've used them many times to both list items for sale as well as purchase services. Coupon codes work very well on these sites because people are more likely to visit a site knowing that they have some "secret" coupon code for a certain percent off, or free shipping, or a flat dollar off coupon.

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.

Another way to get traffic to your site is to comment on other people's blogs. This works the best when you have blogs that get a lot of comments and posts that get a lot of views. Adding a comment that provides insight and adds value to the original message will get people more interested in what you have to say on your website which will create traffic to your site, and depending on the blog will also create some search engine optimization benefits and help you with your website's ranking.

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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