The number one concern of all internet marketers is getting their website or blog seen by others. After all, before you can make any sales, someone has to see your site, right? These three free advertising ideas will help you boost your website’s traffic over time.
Article Marketing
Article marketing is a great way to get traffic for your sites because it allows you to share useful information and get your links out there without really having to promote or sell anything. It is also very powerful because it allows you to generate quality back-links to your site. The more back-links you have, the higher your page rank, and the more traffic you will receive.
You don’t have to be a super great writer to post articles and they don’t have to be very long, either. In fact, short articles of between 300 to 700 words work best.
Articles may be posted to the various article directories on the internet. You want to make sure that the directory has a high Google page rank, because that rank will carry over into your article and allow you to rank on the first page of Google’s organic listings for the keywords you’ve chosen.
There are certain rules to follow when submitting articles and each of the article directories will have somewhat different rules. Most, however, will only allow you to link to “self-serving” websites in the resource box of your article. The resource box usually appears at the end of your article and that’s where you can promote your sites.
The other rule a lot of article directories have is that most will not allow you to use affiliate links as direct links. This does not mean that you can’t promote products as an affiliate with articles, it just means that you have to link from the article to another site that you own and control, and either have your affiliate link on that site somewhere or use a re-direct code to re-direct traffic from your domain to your affiliate link.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past year, you’ve no doubt heard of Twitter. Twitter is a social networking service that allows you to connect with other people and share just about anything. It is kind of like a cross between real time chat rooms and blogging.
Twitter works like this: you open a Twitter account and you search for others who share your interests. You pick people to follow and then follow others whom they are following. Why? Because odds are that everyone who is following any one person who shares your particular area of interest is going to share that interest as well.
Once you’ve begun to follow people, you’ll notice that people are starting to follow you. Now every time you type in a message, everyone who is following you will see your message. Once your followers list grows to a good number, somewhere in the thousands is good, you will have a receptive audience that is interested in what you have to say.
As with any of the other social media, you have to be careful when using Twitter to promote your sites. It is considered bad form, and in fact, spam, to send one promotional message after another repeatedly. Sure, you can post links to your sites, but do so in moderation and intersperse your plugs with some great content that you think your followers will enjoy.
Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is the practice of visiting other blogs in your niche and leaving a comment in some of the posts there, including a link to your website or blog. This will generate back-links to your site or blog, and again, back-links are important to getting more traffic flowing to your site.
When you leave a comment on someone’s blog, you should have something meaningful to say that is related to the post. You should not leave any sort of promotional messages, like “Hey! Love your blog! Come visit my site!” If you do that, don’t be surprised if your message is not approved or gets deleted right away.
Using these free advertising ideas, you can easily build traffic to any website or blog you own. It does take time to build a good volume of traffic, but it won’t cost you a dime and the quality of the traffic you receive is quite high.
