The Internet has millions of users every day, making it a great place to promote your business. Do you think that promoting your business in the Internet is costly? Small business owners like you and me, don't have much budget to pour. Let me share with you on how to promote your business in the Internet in an affordable way.
1. Start blogging
In promoting your business online, you don't have to establish a complicated website. Instead, you can just blog your way through it. Blogging is a very effective way to increase exposure online. Do you know what makes blog a great marketing tool?
There are lots of free and easy to use blog platform, such as Blogspot and Wordpress.
You don't have to know lots of HTML.
Even if you decide to have your own domain name, it only costs you $10/year on a Blogspot platform.
Readers can easily leave comments, and that means you can have 2 way communication with your prospects.
Search engines love blog because of its high updating frequency.
Blog can be used as a center for all your online promotion activities.
2. Get involved in other blogs
By interacting with other blogs, you are not only exposing yourself (or your business) to other bloggers. In fact, you are also exposing yourself to their readers too. If you are sincere in interacting with them, it might even open a joint venture opportunities for you. You can get involved in other blogs by:
giving your ideas and opinions on other blog by leaving your comments.
submit guest posts to other blogs.
3. Article marketing
Article marketing is exactly what I am doing now. You provide useful information by submitting your articles at article directories, and get visitors to your site as a return. If you write enough "useful" articles, then you will be perceived as an expert in the field. The important thing is to write useful contents. If you write junks, then you will have a reverse impact.
Other than readers who found your article by search engines, your articles will also:
be picked by e-zine or blog owners if it is good enough. This will further gives you excellent exposure.
increase back links to you blog, where it will help in increasing your page rank.
From the articles I submitted to article directories, some of them gave high returns of visitors, while some returned lesser numbers. As I analyze the reasons, to have high returns of visitors, your article should:
has a title which is search engine friendly.
has a title which makes people want to read it.
be easy to be read and use subheadings.
has quality content.
be written with passion.
has a link in your resource box, which is consistent to your article content.
4. Offer free e-books
If you have a talent on writing, you can write "useful how to e-books" which relates to your business, and offer it online. It only costs you $19.97 to upload a book at free e-book.net. Some of the e-books were downloaded even up to 7,000 times. It means that your investment cost per head is only 0.003 cents! That is way much cheaper than a PPC campaign.
To furthermore add a viral element in it, you can give permission for other people to pass your e-book for free, or use it as a gift on their website as long as they don't change your content. Again, the important thing here is quality content, then only people will be willing to pass or recommend your e-book.
5. Expose yourself in social media
Every marketer knows that networking is a very important aspect in business. The Internet had made it even easier with lots of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and many other. Although it is not a place to directly promote your products, instead it helps you to:
increase your knowledge.
identify potential joint venture potentials.
increase exposure by words of mouth.
strengthen your branding.
There are many different social media sites, and each one has their own unique features. To use social media effectively, first clarify your purpose on why you want to use them. And then choose the most suitable social media site. Focus on it, and build your network which is based on trust and win-win situations.
Schan Ezan is writing a blog on art of marketing. Use blog marketing the right way, and learn how to drive traffic [http://www.marketersworld.net/2008/10/how-to-promote-your-blog-by-ethically.html] to your blog by interacting with other bloggers. Or just go to [http://marketersworld.net/] and discover lots of other cool ideas on marketing.
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