Promoting Your Business

Promotion. Without it no business really succeeds to it's fullest. And with literally millions of websites and more being launched every day, how does one get their site or business noticed? It's a challenge. It's not easy and it can be a very pain staking and frustrating venture in itself. That is most likely the reason so many websites get dropped after a year or so. No traffic. In todays life is instant gratification and for those who have the patience and tenacity with their business, success will come.

So where does one advertise and promote their website? Because most people who start to run websites have little to no money they are afraid to spend. Unfortunately that is where they make their first mistake. Getting ones website in the search engines should be a priority. It should be number 1 on your to do list. You can submit your site and wait for the crawls or you can use what I have used on all my sites. I use a product from Navahost.com that is called Traffic Blazer. For a simple $30.00 this tool allows one to submit their site to all the major search engines and directories. On top of that you can submit to litterly hundreds of subdirectories, newsletters and blogs. It take about 2 hours to go through the whole process but with one of the site I built it took 3 weeks and the site was listed within the first 3 pages of Yahoo. Not bad considering it would sometimes take up to 6 months of time plus all the hassles of submitting just to get a good position in an engine. Besides, there is an old saying, "If you want anything done, you have to do it yourself." And with Traffic Blazer you do it all yourself and you know exactly what your getting for your money. And well spent money at that.

Free Advertising I don't care what anyone says about free advertising. For me it works. Paid advertising can be better, but there is nothing wrong with free advertising is in the right place. I have used Adlandpro for years. I have never paid for any ads and always used the free ads. Remember every click to you site is a visitor and visitors is what you want. Adland is a great place if you have a site like this. A work at home site, an affiliate site or even an MLM type of biz site. Adland is where about 80,000 people hang out and getting your free ad there does get visitors. I have gotten up to a dozen hits a day from free ads placed there. Now a dozen ads doesn't sound like much but that is like 300 unique visitors a month. If you are just starting out ask yourself how many visitors are you getting now? Any is better than none.

Another good place to advertise and promote your site is to advertise it on Craigslist. Let say your website is about selling pots and pans. Just go to Craigslist and go to the city of your choice and find the category that fits your ad and then ... POST! Craigslist get millions of hits each and everyday around the world. In-fact you can make money using Craiglist. Also remember that Kijiji is a good place to advertise locally or global and it is free. Like most you can upgrade your listings.

Link Exchanges Other sources of free advertising can be found almost anywhere on the internet. Two such sources are traffic exchanges and link exchanges. One thing that you will want to be aware of is some link exchanges. There is a saying that you need to exchange links with other sites to get crawled. This is true but it is not the whole story. Most link exchanges are what they call "link farms". Your link can be buried in the bottom of a bunch of black hat type websites with 0 page ranks. That is not going to do much good for your site at all. If you are going to exchange links, make sure the other site is related somehow to your site. You don't want to have your automotive link on a beauty or ladies type of website. Try to find sites where visitors will be interested in going to your site. Think commonality. That is why I find using traffic exchanges more worth while.

Traffic Exchanges Traffic exchanges are sites that allow you to display your website in front of thousand of people. There are different types of traffic exchanges. There are manual and auto. Auto exchanges gives your site hits, but not so much for views. On the other hand manual exchanges will give you hits plus views. I like manual exchanges the best and the longer the exposure the better. Most TE's have a traffic exchange that offers a 15 second timer so your website gets optimum views. They are free to join, most offer upgrades while the free ones are where you surf others sites. Some allow you to upload banners or text ads for your web site.

PPC. Pay per click advertising. I have never used PPC. Somehow I feel that one would not get their money worth. I have read tons of articles that state they have made great dollars from tons of visitors but I have also read lots of those who paid out big money and had very little in sales. Things like click fraud, and competitors clicking you ads costing you nothing but money. These are reasons why I try to stay with free advertising or as I mentioned earlier, Traffic Blazer.

Getting Leads Anyone who does work on the net doing network marketing or advertising or web promotion of any kind has run into the term "leads". Leads are just that. Leads. You here the terms co-gen leads, optin leads and so forth. What these are are actual leads of people who are interested in your product.

Lets say you have a web site that is selling hub caps for cars. How do you advertise and get buyers for you hub caps? Well one way is to just run ads at random, run ads in automotive type articles, maybe get link or two in some prominent publication or website, just throw ads out blindly into large publications and hope someone reads it, or you could buy leads.

The great thing about buying leads is that first of all these leads are people MIGHT be interested in what you are offering. Second thing is, people have said it is OK to receive email offers from promoters. So how did these people say it was OK? Well at one time they maybe did a survey or requested information online about a certain product or service. During this survey or quiz or questionnaire they were asked if it was OK to receive additional information about certain products? If they said yes, then their emails etc. go into a file that is used for leads. These leads are bout and sold on a daily basis.

Leads really are nothing new, In years gone by cars dealers would buy leads. Let's say you bought a car. The dealer then would give you cards to hand out to friends etc. Say one of those friends came in and bought a car. The dealer would then give you $100 or more. What you did is supplied him a prospect or lead, and he rewarded you for it. Realtors and mortgage brokers use to buy leads. This way they can contact people who are interested buying a house. It's a way of focusing your advertising dollar and time on people who are interested verse people who are not.