Introduction
With today’s world the price of everything seems to be climbing day by day, things like food, petrol and everything else that is required for people live seems to becoming more and more out of reach. This is the same with the online world, people who have just started out trying make a living off the internet are finding it more difficult to make any sort of inroads due to the costs involved with hosting, getting there site up and running and most importantly advertising and lets face it without any sort of advertising to get traffic to your site, your site is basically worthless TRAFFIC = MONEY in the online world people.
Now with advertising being the prime ingredient of either making you or breaking you online you need to weigh up a few options, these would be to either pay for advertising or go the free advertising road or both. The paid option can get you the traffic you want more quickly then the free option but the draw back to the paid option is, yes you guessed it, cost. Now if you’re new to the online business world or running your own business in general then paying for advertising is something that is daunting and can be very expensive so if you choose to go this road at the start of your online venture I suggest you sit down and work out a budget and stick too it.
But this ebook isn’t about using paid advertising it’s about using free advertising to advertise your website and the types of free advertising options that are available to you on the internet, some you might know about, and some you might not know about. I will be going through a number of different options with you for free advertising, all that I’ve used myself and continue to use and I hope you will use them as well and to full affect, so let’s get on with it shell we.
Link exchange sites are great sites to start your free advertising campaign with, they offer a wide variety of advertising options to promote your website or blog with and most importantly you will be able to signup for free. Now for those of you who haven’t heard of or used a link exchange site before the way they normally work are.
* You signup
* Enter your websites details
* Backlink their website on your website
Once you’ve done all that, you will need to start surfing other websites who have link exchanged with the same site, normally the more sites you look at the higher in your websites chosen category you will get, the higher you get the more people will visit your site or the more you surf the more advertising credits you will earn to have your website viewed.
If you didn’t quit understand all that you will when you signup to one of these sites, they are really easy to use but the draw back is they can be time consuming, but the best part is its free advertising for your website and you can’t beat that.
Free Link Exchange Sites
http://www.linkreferral.com
http://www.trafficera.com
http://www.trafficswarm.com
http://trafficechoes.com
Safelists
Safelists are just like opt-in lists but have already been created for you to use, so you won’t need to setup an opt-in site and hope people will join. But I would suggest you have some sort of newsletter opt-in for people to join on your site, because the more people you can reach the better it will be for your website.
Now safelists are a list of emails which you will be able to email to get the message out that you are trying to send, now normally when you join one of these safelist sites you will receive emails from the exact same people you are emailing, offering you all sorts of things. Now what I would suggest you do before joining a safelist site is to create an email account with Google or someone similar and make this an account that you’re never going to use except for receiving emails from safelist sites and signup using this account. Because you will receive hundreds of emails from these sites once you join, but the good news is you will also receive lots of visitors to your site as well which is what we want and the best part is you don’t have to pay for it.
Most of the safelist sites will only let you send an email once a week and to a limited number of people, but the more you join the more people you will be likely to reach. These are a great way to get the word out about your website quickly and get the traffic coming to you.
Free Safelist Sites
http://www.businessworldlist.com
http://www.safelister.com
Pixel advertising was thought up by a chap from England named Alex Tew(check Google for more info) back in 2005 with his advertising website the million dollar home page and he sold tiny little squares or pixels at 10x10 for $100 and made just over a million dollars from it. Since then hundreds of these sites have popped up on the net offering similar advertising deals and best of all a lot of them offer free advertising as well.
Pixel sites are a great way to get visitors to your site and not to mention targeted visitors as well. The way pixel advertising sites work are:
* You select a position on the grid to place your ad.
* You then choose a picture to place in that position.
* Write a very short description on your site
* Add your email and you’re finished.
Once you’ve done the above you will normally have to confirm your email address before your ad is shown on the grid, easy. There are hundreds of these sites on the web all waiting for you to add your ad, another great way to advertise for free.
Free Pixel Advertising Sites
http://pixeladverts.freehostia.com
http://www.millionpixelsadvert.com/index.php
http://www.grabachat.com
But for social pages like myspace and facebook to work properly so you can attract them to visit your own website, you have to set them up in a way that’s going to want them to become your friend. Once you have them as your friend then you can start market your website to them in more ways.
When it comes to promoting your website on social networking websites, you have a number of different options. Your first option is to include a link to your website in your community profile or profile page. This will allow other community members to checkout your website, only if they wish to do so. The other way is to inform your online friends of your website through private messages. Once you join a social networking website and create or join a network of friends, you should easily be able to communicate with those friends. Sending each of your friends a private message with information and a link to your website tends to be more effective than just placing a link in your profile or on your profile page.
This is a great free advertising resource and there are plenty to choose from, so try a few out and see which works best for you
Free Social Networking Sites
http://www.yuwie.com
http://www.facebook.com
http://www.myspace.com
Advertising with forums is a great way to attract a more targeted visit to your website, there are forums dedicated to almost very topic you can think of and using forums that are related to your own website is great for getting better quality traffic. When advertising in forums it’s important to read the rules of the forum before you jump straight in with advertising your website, if the admin thinks your only there to spam the forum to try and get traffic to your website then you will be quickly banned. The best way to advertise using a forum is to create a signature which most forums will allow you to do and use this signature as a way to tell people about your site.
If you’re going to use a forum to advertise your website the best thing for you to do is to get involved in discussion, ask questions, answer question, let people get to know you and trust you and make them think your not just there to advertise something. Forums can work great at generating traffic to your website if used correctly, so get involved and use the forum for what it’s designed to do and your website will see the benefits from it.
Free Advertising Forums
http://marketingforum.freehostia.com/smf/
http://www.thefreeadforum.com/vbull/
Classified Ads
Using classified ads to attract visitors to your website is a great way to get targeted traffic from your local area and from around the world. There are a number of free classified ad sites on the internet which can help you generate traffic from different cities and places from around the world, you just choose the city or place you want to target, write a catchy ad with your web address and post very simple.
Free Classified Ad Sites
http://waldospost.com
Writing Articles
Writing articles about topics related to your website is a very good way to attract people interested in the same topic you are to your site. The way you do this is you write the articles in a way that they don’t look like ads, if the article site that you intend to post to thinks all your doing is advertising something they will most likely not post it and you will be forced to rewrite it. So pick something related to your website to write about, so if your site is on basketball write an article on one of teams and how they are going this season then at the end of your article tell the reader that they can find more information on this topic at your website.
The more articles you write the more back links to your website you will have so try and write at least 3 a week and post them to as many article sites as you can. A tip when writing articles is to use “keywords” using keywords in your articles will help your articles gain a better position in the search engines allowing people searching Google and Yahoo using your keywords to find you easier.
Once your articles have been published a good thing to do is to add them to bookmark sites like www.dropjack.com www.digg.com and http://delicious.com this will help spread the word more quickly and get people reading your articles and hopefully have people clicking your link.
Free Article Sites
http://www.articlesfactory.com
Squidoo
Creating a Squidoo lens on a topic related to your website is a great way to create a backlink to your website and promote your website at the same time. Squidoo lenses are easy to create and can be done in minutes, and you can create as many as you like using the same login details. Squidoo lens are great for advertising your website as they will rank high in the search engines so use good keywords which relate to your website. A key to making a successful lens is to make it content rich, the more content you can ad too it the better it will do, so put some effort in to it and keep adding to it just like you would with your website.
Again once your happy with your lens and you have published it, use sites like dropjack, digg and delicious to help get the world out about your newly created lens. Doing all this is also creating backlinks to your website, so the more bookmark sites you use the more backlinks you will have to your website which will lead to higher ranking in the search engines depending of course on your keywords.
I hope all of these free advertising tactics helps your site in someway and I hope you enjoyed the read. There a plenty of more free advertising options out there on the net but I might hold off on mentioning them at the moment and use them in an updated version later on. Remember everything that is mentioned above can be repeated over and over so the more you do it the more traffic you are likely to receive, best of luck to you.
The End
