Chapter 6: Balancing Your Promotions
Promotion of your online business may take a variety of directions. Some will bring more success than others.
Everyone is important to consider when you are trying to open the door to visitors to your site.
This article discusses several of the more useful ways to promote and the necessity of keeping some balance in your promotional efforts.
Search Engines
Everyone needs to make an effort to get their site indexed to the major search engines.
If you want more people to visit your website, you must know how to create search-engine-friendly web pages, and then submit your URL to all the major search engines. That's what this site is all about.
Linking
Think of links on other websites as road signs that point to your site. That's what links do. They will be useful if they are on high traffic sites that are relevant to your site's content.
Now there are many ways to create and maintain links. Too many for this article to discuss. Here are a couple of pointers about linking.
Avoid "link farms" that create a load of useless, irrelevant links to your site. They may do more harm than good with the search engines.
I recommend that you create a links page and manually add and delete links. Avoid purchasing and installing scripts or other such methods.
If you don't have the skills to do that then, there are some good paid services that will manage your links. A simple search on one of the major search engines will turn up a bunch.
Here are a couple that I can recommend:
Reciprocalmanager.com Linksmanager.com Websitetoolbox.com
Joint Ventures
This is simple. I have something to promote. You have a website or newsletter. I will pay you a portion of my profits to promote it.
It can work well if you can endorse the item with a personal statement and recommendation.
Be careful of jumping on all offers. Make sure they are legitimate.
Articles
One of the least expensive and most effective ways to get some exposure for your business or newsletter is to write and distribute articles.
Publishers are looking for good, fresh content for their newsletters and ezines. You provide it with a well-researched article.
The tradeoff is that they are required to include a short resource box at the end of the article that links back to your site.
It's a Win-Win situation.
One of the ways to let your article gain exposure is to list it in several of the online article directories like:
ArticleToGo.com BizSiteBiz.com Marketing-seek.com Articlecentral.com
There are many others. Just search "article directories".
Ad Swaps
Great way to get some no-cost exposure. If you have an ezine or newsletter, just locate some similar publications and offer to swap ads with them.
Ezine Advertising
Probably the easiest ways to get some exposure quickly is to locate and advertise in some selected publications.
Be sure that the newsletter is likely to reach your target audience. It won't do much good to promote your "Yellow widgets" to an ezine which is made up of readers who are mothers of newborns interested in learning about how to mix baby formula.
You can also spend some serious money quickly with this type of promotion. Be sure and track your ads to make sure you are making money above your advertising expenses.
Depending on the nature of your online business, some of these promotional types may have more or less relevance for you.
Whichever means you use, try and keep a balance in your efforts that will allow you to most effectively reach your target audience.