Welcome to our list of tips helping you promote your site, improve search engine ranking and attract visitors. These are all free, easy to do, and do not require a large time investment.
Optimize your site and get listed: For starters if we have designed your site for you, your website is already ready for this. If you are working on your own website or just dropping in to check out our website then we hope this helps you out some. First and this is very important you must optimize your website for the search engines and then list it with them.
Exchange Links: Getting other websites to link to your site will increase your “Site Popularity” in the search engines eyes. Doing this is one of the most significant factor that will affect your rankings. Tahoe Web Services offers a linking program that we will add to your website. Joining link exchange programs will help in attracting people to exchange links with. If you google search “Link Exchange” you are sure to come up with thousands of places to do this.
Forums & Boards: If you join a forum that is related to things that your website is about is a prime opportunity to list your site URL in your forum signature (this will be crawled by the search engines) It also allows you to refer people back to your website. We are involved in a few forums “When We Have Time” and have spoken with many people about site development and hosting services; this has helped us bring customers that at the time were very unhappy with their host or the way their website was built. We have had the chance to turn things around for them and their website. So it pays to visit online communities as you never know when a customer is posting about something that they need and you can produce. We do not recommend joining every forum on the net! Stick with forums that are related to you and your product.
Newsletters: Publishing newsletter about your product is a great way to spread the word about what you are doing. You will want to try to send out one issue per month (anything more then that will be just like spam! And well every one knows that people hate spam). When you publish your news letter you are going to want to place links to your website or products or direct them to pages on your website that they can find more information on the subject. You can find many free mailing list programs by searching google.
ADD URL’s: By doing a search on the internet using the terms “add url” will help you find pages that you can add your websites link for free. Our you can try the term “niche and your subject”. By doing this, you will be listing your website on thousands of pages. Again you will want to stick to places that are related to your website! For example if your site is about “birds” well you are not going to want to list it on a page that is about “cats”.
Network: Place a link to your website when the opportunity arises. Try adding your link in your email signature, forums, business cards, voicemail, etc. The more your link is out in the publics eye! The better off you are.
Give Away Things: Offer free information, links, samples, what ever might be applicable to your website and business. This will better guarantee that your site may be personally referred to someone else. Doing this will also help by attracting visitors to your site and provide an opportunity for them to explore more of your website.
Business Cards: Hand them out with your website URL on them. Leave them behind in stores, after you dine out leave a card on the table, hand them out when you are in a large group of people, or whenever an opportunity exists. You can either pay to have these cards printed or you can purchase a program at a reasonable price in any office supply store. Of course doing this yourself will suck your ink dry! And we all know how much ink costs these days. Many companies offer deals of getting 100 cards free with the purchase of 100 cards, etc. Google will offer many locations that you can search for business card makers and programs.
Use Your Car: Have a bumper sticker, window decal or magnetic door panels created with your site’s URL. A driving billboard if you will.
Wear Your Website: Of course this is an age old solution, but it works!! Place your URL on hats, shirts, etc with your logo and site URL. Wear them around town. Give them to friends and family or even send them out with product! Everyone likes a free shirt, Trust me they will wear these items and bring you free advertising. We have seen and heard of people using cafe press. I have no clue on the quality of product they offer! but it might just be something for you to check into.
Your Home Town: Do not forget about your home town. Many people when they get on the World Wide Web! They stretch their marketing all over the place and forget about the home town they are in. Many future customers are living in your home town or maybe even right next door. Place some of your logos, URL, flyers, etc. at your local supermarkets, post office, library, neighborhood, churches, schools, your local newspaper, etc. Chances are people will be pretty interested in buying or visiting the site of a local person.
Affiliate Programs: Sign up for one of these programs such as Commission Junction (cj.com) this will allow people to place your product or a banner on their site. Of course this can get pretty costly at times! However the price could be out weighed by some major sales on your end. I would look into any program costs prior to signing up! These programs may or may not work and could suck your budgeting for marketing dry very quickly. Hey but it is worth looking into.
Len Cavanaugh
Owner
Filed under: Marketing Tips & Tricks
