3 Ways to Market Your Website for Free
By Kathy Wilson
I have been helping women get started with online business for some time now, and I draw from my own experience when I started my own websites on a shoestring budget. Nowadays, we are all trying to save money. If you are thinking of starting your own online business and you don’t know how you will be able to afford to market and advertise, here are 3 great ideas that I used myself to launch very successful sites.
Optimize.
This means your website, and you want to optimize it for search engines. No, you don’t have to pay an SEO company hundreds of dollars to do this for you, and you don’t have to pay them to submit your site to search engines. You just have to do some research and be patient. When building pages on your site, make sure that you take the time to find out some popular (but not too popular) keywords for your topic, and include them often (but not too often). How do you know what is too often? Well there are formulas that people purport to be the most ideal number of times a page should have the same keyword. Since I subscribe to the idea of quality content is king, this is what I feel is the failsafe way to optimize your page. Include your keyword or keyword phrase in the opening sentence if possible. Also include it in the closing paragraph. Then I use it as often in the body of the page as sounds reasonable. If you read the page back to yourself out loud, you will hear if your page is oversaturated with the phrase; remember most importantly you want to offer your readers quality content. Try to include an anchor text link on the page with the keywords as well. Search engines will crawl your site on their own and find your keywords…
Write.
It’s not like English class folks. Write articles like you were talking to a friend about your topic. Teach things, discuss controversies, offer opinions. The average article should be between 400-600 words. Again, use those keywords, but make it sound natural. Add a resource box at the end of each article inviting readers to visit your website and include your url. Even better, offer them something free for visiting and signing up for your newsletter. Submit those articles to article banks like Ezinearticles, but also find similar sites to yours and ask the webmasters if they would be interested in free reprint article in exchange for a live link in your resource box. All webmasters are looking for content. I got most of my initial traffic from finding a few well established sites that offered my articles in their newsletters. You also get points with the search engines the more places your articles appear, which down the road will result in more search engine traffic.
Network.
Make friends and colleagues! We’re all in this together, and you would be surprised out how we can help each other in our business ventures if we just reach out. Join Facebook and start to request friends in like minded business pursuits. Send emails to webmasters whose sites you admire and ask for advice. Once you establish relationships, look for ways you can help each other. Maybe you can trade newsletter recommendations, each offering up the other to their readers. Trade advertisements on your websites, or go into a joint venture with each other. Have a contest together and put out press releases, or offer a collection of your articles as a free ebook for their readers as viral marketing.
None of these ideas costs a thing, but it takes just one webmaster with a large list to reprint one of your articles or recommend one of your pages to get you started. And once the search engines start sending you traffic, its just a matter of time before you attract more and more networking situations. Its like a giant snowball, but you have to be the one to continue to market your website in order to keep that snowball going! And you can do it for free!
Stumble It!
