Do you have a website that is getting very little or no traffic at all?
Well, I can put you on a path to changing that within the time it will take you to read this article. We will review
each of the strategies you can use to promote your website, and then we will try to assimilate them into a single,
uniform strategy that is both highly effective and affordable.
First of all, TV commercials, radio ads, and print advertising are very expensive. This is undoubtedly the best
way to launch a business, but the costs are prohibitive. A full page ad in a prominent magazine or other publication
can run as high as $50,000 per ad. TV commercials can run just as high; if the commercial runs during a popular
television show or sporting event, the cost will be enormous.
So, if you do not have enough money in the coffers for traditional advertising, you need to resort to online marketing.
This is not a bad thing. Offline advertising (i.e. radio, TV, print ads) is sometimes not effective. Marketing
on the internet is cheaper, and if done correctly, can give you much more bang for your buck.
Obviously, the cornerstone of internet marketing is search engine submission and optimization. There are hundreds
of different search engines and directories on the internet where you can submit your web site for a listing. This
is fairly easy to do. Simply sign up for a monthly submission plan with a credible search engine submission service.
There are literally hundreds of these submission services on the internet; you can find them by performing a search
on Google.
However, be wary of submitters that claim to be able to submit your site to 75,000 search engines. Such services
are scams, and they will submit your web page to FFA pages and bogus link pages that can actually get you banned
from the search engines. You should only do business with submission services that submit to the major search engines
and directories.
Now that we have covered submission, we need to talk about search engine optimization (SEO), which is even more
important. To optimize a site, you need to maximize keyword density and optimize the positioning for the words
or phrases that best characterize the subject matter of your site, and you need to use proper Meta tags so that
the search engines can interpret your web pages.
If you do not know how to optimize your web site, you should search for an optimization professional on Google.
Steer clear of SEO experts who want to charge $1,000 per month or more. Their goal is to bleed you dry before you
figure out that they really can not help you get to the top of the rankings. Stick to providers who will optimize
your site for a one-time fee.
More important than SEO is link popularity. Link popularity is the number of web sites that currently link to your
site. The more inbound links you acquire, the higher your search engine ranking will be. There are more than a
few ways to acquire links, but I have a certain strategy that worked well for me.
My advice to you is to write articles and press releases and submit them to article directories and press release
distribution services who will then distribute your articles and press releases to other websites who will publish
them and in return link back to you. Also, you can submit your site to bloggers through a popular service called
Blogitive (Blogitive will get blogs to post one-way anchor text links to your site in their blog, which will greatly
enhance your search engine ranking).
If you are not patient enough to wait for your search engine ranking to improve, you can attract visitors to your
web site instantly by using pay-per-click advertising (PPC). With PPC, you pay a certain cost per click to have
an ad for your web page run at or near the top of the search engine listings for certain keywords. This can be
extremely costly and ineffective. It is not uncommon for webmasters to blow thousands of dollars on PPC advertising
and make only a few sales.
The best way to promote your site, if you are actually selling something, is through an affiliate program. You
need to provide an affiliate code to other online merchants so that they will place your banner on their site;
every time you make a sale that resulted from an affiliate referral, the affiliate gets a commission. Some internet
companies have thousands of affiliates, and get all the business they would ever need or want this way; and it
costs you nothing.
To recruit affiliates, you should submit your affiliate program to as many directories as possible (there are directories
where you can list your affiliate program for free). The best way to find affiliates is by listing your program
on forums or message boards visited by webmasters who are looking to generate additional revenue for their online
business. You will have to consult with an experienced programmer who can set up the affiliate program so that
the codes used to track sales for each affiliate will work properly.
So, to summarize, you should first optimize your website and submit it to search engines. You should then begin
submitting articles and press releases to article directories and press release distribution services. You should
also submit your site to Blogitive so that bloggers will write a review of your site and link to it, further boosting
your link popularity. You might want to join a link exchange, but trading links often proves fruitless. Also, you
should set up an affiliate program. And finally, you should budget a small amount of money to spend each week on
pay-per-click.
If you are persistent and use all of these methods, you will continually increase your traffic over a period of
time. It will probably take approximately 3 years of performing each of the tasks outlined in this article, on
a daily basis, to get where you want to be. Just stick with it and your efforts will be rewarded in the long run.
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