Advertising Your Website Online And Offline
By: Steve Ellias – May 26, 2013
This is the biggest hurdle once all your website is finished and you are ready to receive visitors to your site. Advertising online can be very difficult, expensive, and time consuming. For businesses that start off with no advertising funds, this is a grim task to try and advertise your site for free. Having said that, we are going to go through several paid and free ways to advertise your website online and offline.
Advertising Online
Search Engine Visitors
The best way to advertise your business online for free is to have a SEO friendly website and be found generically by people searching Google, Yahoo, and Bing for services and products that you offer. This is the best way any online business can advertise because it will generate tons of visitors to your website and these visitors can buy products and services from you. Of course, this is one of the hardest free advertising things you can try to accomplish because it takes diligence and hard work on the SEO part of your website to get it perfect for the search engines to rank it good enough to be found close to the top of these search engines in order for you to get those potential visitors.
Email Promotional Campaign
This is also a great way to advertise your website. The issue with this is that you need to capture email addresses from a sign-up form in order to have the potential customers on your YES list and without spamming them. They have to actually agree to get emails from your system. If you have an email newsletter that can provide some very valuable information to the recipients of this letter, this will help to get more emails addresses. Some issues from email marketing is that too many people have captured email addresses from free classified and directories website and from software that allows them to extract email addresses and people are very reluctant to give out their email anymore because this form of advertising is way over used and over spammed. Of course, you can always capture email addresses from good customers and as long as they have you on their no-spam list, this will help you gain more sales. This will not help a business that is new and who purchases email addresses or extracts them. This will only get you email address on the black list and banned.
Advertising with Call List
This is another way to advertise your online business by calling potential customers and promoting your products and services through the phone, cell phone, or even text messages. The issues with this method is that it is considered spam if you do not seek permission to use their phone for up-coming promotions or sales.
Using Free Classified And Directory Websites
There are several free classified and directory websites out there that you may promote your products and services to gain customers and visits to your website. In Canada, KIJIJI has become a popular website for advertising and promoting products as well as there is a service section you may use yo help advertise your website business. In the United States, Craigslist and Backpage are also very good websites to promote your website business in their service category. I have put together some sites below for your convenience. With Craigslist and Backpage, you may place your URL address. With KIJIJI, you have to pay $5.00 to add a URL to your listing.
Here Is A List Of Classified Website You Can Use
Craigslist
BackPage
Kijiji Canada
Ebay Classifieds
Prepky Directory
Locanto Canada
Postad
iSell Classifieds
Your Classifieds
OLX Classifieds
Yatoola
Add To Special Directory Websites And Google Places
Google Places
When you start your website, you may add your business to Google Places and all you have to do is verify your address in by receiving a letter from Google with a PIN# and adding it to your Google Places account. This is a great FREE way to have your site found in Google Places and it’s also a great way to build up your backlinks in Google.
Specialized Directories
Make sure you website is clean, have your business address on the bottom, and add your site to the DMOZ directory, Please make sure you follow all their guideline because it’s hard to get your site in their directory and it’s a great place to have a link and to advertise your business.
Online Phone Book Directories
Add your website to phone-book websites like 411 and Yellow Pages. These guys will try and sell you advertising top spots, but just add your site for review and someone will call you. Be strong not to give into their sales pitch and after you have put up with them trying to sell you top spots, you will have a free listing in their directory.
Use The Power Of Social Networking
Create an account for as many social networking sites as you can. This will help you in two aspects. The first would be to generate a good backlink to your website and these days, Google like social networkign involvement. The second would be to actually get people to click on your link and hopefully you will generate sales from your products and services on your website. Also, take advantage of the facebook likes and Google + 1’s and increase your ranking in these social networking websites.
Create Social Networking Sites That Will Increase Your Back links and Clicks to Your Website
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Stumbleupon
Google Plus
Tumblr
Delicious
My Space
You Tube (Create Videos And Helpful Information)
Create also a Facebook business page and advertise and promote your products in this business page from facebook. You can also create a LinkedIn group that will help you dicuss all your products and services. These social networking pages you create may be found in Google before your own website.
Write Articles in Places to Show People You Are Knowledgeable on Your Products and Services
Ezine Articles
Squidoo
Yahoo Answers
Google News
HuffingtonPost
Create a Blog or Forum to Help Advertise Your Products and Services
Have a blog in place that is attached to your site if your site is not already just a blog. Having a blog will help generate more visitors back to your site and always keep your information up-to-date and fresh so people will continue to come back and read your new and up-to-date info.
Comment on other blogs. Many of the blog sites will allow for you to make your name on the comment look like an associated with your website/blog. By commenting on relevant blogs you will in most cases bring targeted website traffic to your website and raise awareness of your existence to the owner of the blog site. If you are investing great deals of time and effort into producing useful material in your remarks, the blog writer might decide to award you for the effort and link to you by means of blogroll. Some of these blog sites are “do follow” blogs and talking about them will provide you with SEO perk to.
Advertise Your Business Using Paid Advertising – Offline Advertising
There are several and endless ways you can spend money online advertising. However, there is only a handful of useful and powerful ways to actually get your money’s worth and you’re ROI – Return on Investment. I have put together a few ways to help you to start your online paid advertising.
Google Ad Words
Ad Roll
Facebook
Paid (top Ads) Classified Websites
News Paper
Business Cards
Flyers
Directories Like 411 And Yellow Pages
Google Ad Words
Google Ad Words is by far one of the best ways to get your site on the top of the biggest search engine in the world. These ads you create can quickly get a potential customer to your website. However, the cost increases dramatically depending on the geographical care you wish to advertise and the field or business you are trying to promote.
Without web design services, we offer a free $100.00 ad words credits to each and every one of our valued customers. We are also an ad words affiliate business and can set-up your ad words campaign and monitor it on your behalf.
Ad Roll
AdRoll is a simple and effective platform for advertising online and re targeting previous website visitors to bring them back to your site. Its an alternative to Google Ad Words.
Facebook Advertising
This is similar to Google Ad Words, but is only within the Facebook community and you can choose your geographical area to advertise and the audience you wish to advertise to.
Paid Classified Services
With using paid services for places like Kijiji and Backpage, you may add an URL, get your listing put on the top of others, and have it at the top for several days without losing its standing in the ad order. Backpage also gives customers the opportunity to place ads in several cities through-out the world and is very cost-effective. This creates a lot of advertising and also lost of back links to your website.
News Paper
If you online business concentrates locally or within a small geographical area, you might want to consider placing an ad in the local newspaper to get people’s attention on your products and services you are selling or promoting.
Business Cards
It’s always a good practice to hand out business cards to everyone you know or meet. This one person you hand a business card out to might go to your website and take action. (Purchase a product or service from you) They might even tell others and this could start a huge chain reaction if the service or product you are offering is worth it. Always create business cards and always have them on you when you need them. For the cost, its well worth getting some created.
Flyers or Ad Bags in Mail or Delivered To Homes
Again, if your business is locally owned and operated and your competition is not in a large geographical area, flyers might be a great alternative or addition to newspaper advertising.
Directories Like 411 and Yellow Pages
For a nominal fee, you can choose to place your website listing with 411 or Yellow Pages as a paid listing and be found on the top of their directory for the city you choose. These directories are great in some cases because they actually come up first in Google for certain areas and this could be your chance to get those potential customers. These directories usually have specials and packages that will consist of one city or several as a package deal with you saving a little but for choosing a package. The cost varies for city you choose, but for an example you could spend from $25.00 a month to $200.00 per more a month. For this form of paid advertising, I would suggest trying it and seeing if you get your return back on your investment and then you can choose to continue their services. Normally there is no contract and all they require is a month cancellation notice to stop your paid services with them.
Summary of Advertising Online
This is the hardest factor to consider when you have your site finished. It’s one thing to build the best website in the world, but if people cannot find it, it will not do you any good what so ever. You will need to advertise it in order to get those potential customers and clients because without advertising your site, the only way is to have a perfect website in Google’s eyes and hope that Google will put you on the first page. This takes a lot of time and tons of effort.
Be resilient and work hard. Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it and want something bad enough. Start with getting that website looking great and excellent when it comes to SEO.
