Online business owners, how did you get word out on your site? Any free advertising advice?

Question

We are not yet at paid advertising phase. We are a free online service and we want people to benefit from our service but just don't know how to gain trust and members.

Answer 1

Join the business network, it's free

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/onlinebusinessguide/

Answer 2

Content is king...and not any old content. Content rules. There is an emerging concept out there calll CTPM or Content-Traffic-Pre-sell-Monetize.

The Search Engines find good content without any coaxing or paying....because that what they are set up to do. What's on your pages count to the engines as on-page content, but what folks do after they leave your pages counts to the Search Engines as Off page actions that speak for or against you.

If they come back to you on their own, that called a completed in-bound link of sorts, and the more surfers come back to you, the higher and prominently you'll rank on subsequent searches.

But only good content brings about those off page surfer actions, not paying yahoo, google or any other search engines as the Gods of SEO or Search Engine Optimizing will tell you.

What some think is good content is yet another thing though.

Oversimplified it means write great content which then drives great pre-sold traffic , then monetize the site. That's in very simple terms .
A better explanation and walk through may be found at the first link below.

Once you get there , go to Recent Posts, then "I don't want to say I told you so....but", then click ther and go to The TAO of CTPM...you'll never look back.

The second link is the" hands on" application of the principle.

Answer 3

Write Articles about different destinations. If you do not have a website, give a phone number in the bio.

What if I told you that you could produce 15 thousand unique visitors a month, That the visitors would be highly targeted which means that they have a current interest in your products or services, and that it would be 100% free. Would you take the time to at least read to find out?

Now, Would you believe you can get to this level in about 3 months with less than 30 hours a month in labor.

Article marketing is your huckleberry if you want this mush targeted traffic for free. Article marketing has the ability to make your site highly popular not only in the general publics eyes, but also the major search engines. Lets cover some search engine information first.

The first thing we need to do is dispel a few myths. The first myth is that links from related sites are better than non related sites. This is part true , Each page within a site is its own entity. PR is a way to prove it as a rank is assigned to each page, not one rank for the entire site, so a link on a related page is effective. Like an article directory.

The reason I say this is because the value of a link is rated by PR of the page the link is on, notice I did not say site? Having your keyword or some of your keywords in the title and content of the page. Number of outbound links from the page and the text or keywords close to your link. This is just a few of the factors. There are many other factors like position of the link on the page.

The beauty of articles is that you control the content and the title of the page it is published on. If you go to any article directory and click on an article you will notice that the title of the page is the title of the article. Most bloggers and web-site publishers also use the same practice. So, if you write your title right you just acquired links with your keywords in the title of the page. That just helped the power of the link. Now, if you manage to get your keywords of phrases in the content you just made it more powerful.

This is starting to look pretty good now, Lets keep going and see if we can find some more places to find advantages of articles.

The whole reason of articles is to gain targeted traffic, Right? Well, I am going to blow your mind here, Let me show you some stats from just one article.


Article id 328196 on ezinearticles.com has had 241 views, 16 publishes and emailed 1 time. And this is just 1 article in one directory. With a 1% click through ratio that is 2 clicks to the site. Not very impressive. Lets investigate a little deeper.

This article was submitted to about 100 directories and is showing about 150 times in Google. To see this get an article title and past it in a search engine and you can see how may times it is indexed by that search engine. Now with an average of 2 clicks per publish, that just brought the traffic to 300 clicks from one article.

I can write an article in about an hour, What would 300 clicks cost on adwords? Are you starting to get the picture?

Now lets start writing just 1 article a day and now we do 300 times 30. That is for 30 days in a month. Now what does your traffic look like? It still gets better. What does month 2 do, what about month 3 and so on.

These figures are not counting what you get from Google, Yahoo and MSN from the higher rankings in the search engines. The natural search traffic varies depending on your keywords.

Now, the page you get your article on starts as a pr0 page, what will it be in a few months, you just increased the value of the links again, plus the traffic. Then you might have some bloggers or website owners that put your article on a pr 5 page.

The entire internet marketing game is nothing but math. Keep playing the numbers and you will soon win your game.

Articles are the most effective and cost effective way to get traffic and high search engine rankings. You have to stay consistent to make it happen.

Where else can you generate that kind of traffic and links in only 30 hours a month?.

If you want to succeed in the online marketing game, you had better make articles just as regular as your fluid intake. You are doomed to have a weak business without articles.

You say you are doing well now? How would another 15 to 20 k uniques a month help your bottom line?

It does not happen over night, but by month 2 you will start seeing a good increase in traffic and links and you know the traffic is targeted and the links are quality and are only going to get stronger.


http://www.idnmedia.com

Answer 4

You can start an email campaign from collected email accounts. Create a page with an offer for more information about your online service. For the information have a place where the visitor can leave their email and you can send them more info. Also writing and submitting articles to search engines and article hubs (site that display articles) will generate a buzz for your site. If you want you can check out my site at http://typeathomeopportunity.blogspot.com for more info about getting the word out about your site. You can contact me about your site too and I might be able to dedicate a post on my blog about it.