30 Ways to promote your business on a shoestring budget - Tip 5

5. Banner Advertising

Banners are graphics, which are linked to a website. You can create your own banner and either exchange it with someone, so that you display their banner on your site and in return they display your banner on their site. Whenever someone clicks on the banner, they are taken directly to the advertised website.

To save time, you can join a Banner Exchange programs, such as:
http://www.linkbuddies.com
http://www.showyoursite.com
http://www.yesnexus.com

Ivana Katz
Websites 4 Small Business
www.web4business.com.au

30 Ways to promote your business on a shoestring budget - Tip 4

4. Link Exchanges

Find websites whose business complements yours and add their website to your links/resource page. Then contact the company and ask for a reciprocal link. For example if you are a wedding dress designer, you could contact businesses that sell wedding cakes, jewellery, flowers and also venues, celebrants etc.

By doing this your website will become a valuable resource for your visitors, as it will provide information they need. They may return to your site over and over to find more information.

On the other hand, you will have visitors coming to your website when they following a link from your link partners.

Results in search engines are determined by the material you have presented on your site and by other off-page factors such as how many other sites link to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site from relevant websites, the higher your site will rank.

If you need help with this task, you can employ the services of a Link Exchange Company. They are generally inexpensive and can save you hours of time. Some of these include:

http://www.linkexchanged.com/
http://www.powerlinks.com
http://www.links-pal.com/

Ivana Katz
Websites 4 Small Business
www.web4business.com.au

30 Ways to promote your business on a shoestring budget - Tip 3

3. Search Engines & Directories

A search engine is a searchable database of websites collected by a computer program (called a crawler, robot or spider). When you enter a keyword, the search engine looks for keywords in its database, and any relevant records are displayed. Currently there are thousands of search engines and directories on the internet. Some of the main ones include:
Google - www.google.com
Altavista - www.altavista.com
Yahoo - www.yahoo.com
Excite - www.excite.com
AllSearchEngines - www.allsearchengines.com
Northern Light - www.northernlight.com
DogPile - www.dogpile.com
AllTheWeb - www.alltheweb.com
Lycos - www.lycos.com

When submitting your website to the search engines, you can either do it manually by going to the search engine website and adding your URL (website address) or you can employ the services of a Search Engine Submission company, who will do it for you.
www.submitexpress.com
www.wpromote.com
www.website-submission.com

Search engines try to list sites that contain good content, so you need keywords and phrases on your pages that best describe your service and products. For example, if you are a florist, use the words such as florist, online florist, virtual florist, wedding florist, florist in Sydney, florist on line, flowers, floral, bouquets, floral arrangements etc as many times as possible to ensure high search engine ranking. To find out what keywords your customers may be searching on ask your family and friends or go to:http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/http://www.wordtracker.com

Once you decide on the keywords, use them in
(a) Your website’s domain name
(b) The title of your page - This is displayed in the top bar of your browser window
(c) The heading of your home page
(d) The first paragraph of your home page
(e) Meta tags - Keywords, page title, description
(f) Titles of your graphics

Whilst it is important to use keywords as much as possible, it is also important you use them only if they are relevant and do not sound awkward. If you spam your keywords you may be penalised or even banned by some search engines.

If this all seems too overwhelming, you can employ the services of a Search engine optimization company, who will make your website’s content more search engine friendly to make it rank higher. www.melbourneit.com.au (for VIP treatment - advise you are our customer - partner ID 5597)www.websight.net.au
www.bmcoptimise.com.au
www.e-channel.com.au

For a comprehensive listing of search engines, go to:
http://www.web4business.com.au/ResourcesListSearchEngines.htm

Ivana Katz
Websites 4 Small Business
www.web4business.com.au

30 Ways to promote your business on a shoestring budget - Tip 2

2. Leads

There are many companies who will provide leads or prospects for your business. For a fee, they will display your advertisement (similar to a classified ad) and when someone clicks on it, they will be taken to your website. The great thing about these targeted leads is that you are only paying for the people who want to know about your business and products. If you work out the cost of a lead versus regular advertising, you will no doubt come out on top. Generally the cost per lead is between $0.50 - $1.00. If on the other hand you advertise in a newspaper or a magazine and pay $200 for the advertisement from which you get 20 enquiries, the cost per lead is $10.

Check out:
http://leadfactory.com/leads/
http://www.getresponse.com
http://www.prospectshop.com.au/

Ivana Katz
Websites 4 Small Business
www.web4business.com.au

30 Ways to promote your business on a shoestring budget - Tip 1

You are very excited!! You have finally created your own website!! But the trouble is customers aren’t knocking on your website door. Why? What should you do?

The most probable answer is that your customers don’t know about your website.

Creating a website is like building a house. If you don’t tell your friends they won’t know you’ve built a house. Even if they do know you’ve been building it, if you don’t tell them your address they’ll never find you.

And the same goes for your website. There is no magic internet fairy who will knock on people’s door to announce your website’s arrival. The task is up to you. To get your website marketing off the ground you either need to spend time learning and doing it or spend money and get somebody else to do it.

There are hundreds of ways to promote your business. You can do it on line or off line or a combination of both. Much will depend on your budget and the time you have available. Choose as many options below as your time and budget allows. Test as many methods of marketing as you can and see what brings you best results. Website marketing is not a one off exercise. You need to constantly work on it, fine-tune it, discard methods that are not working and implement new ones.

1. Email Marketing

Your first step should be to send an email to your existing clients announcing the arrival of your website. In your message, you can even ask them to forward your email onto their friends, family and colleagues.

If you are starting a new business and don’t have any customers, send an email to people you know who may be interested in your offer.

The next step should be to send your announcement to an opt-in email list. Opt-in email lists contain people or businesses who have requested to receive information about a certain topic(s). There are many companies who can provide you with these lists. For more information visit:

www.prospectshop.com.au/email_lists.html
www.4webmarketing.biz/email.htm
www.ezemail.biz/list_power.html
www.ezemail.biz/list_consumer.html
www.webfirm.com.au/email-marketing-australia/

Under no circumstance should you EVER send unsolicited email (spam) to people you either don’t know or who have not requested to receive your information.

Next time we will look at getting leads for your business.

Ivana Katz
Websites 4 Small Business
www.web4business.com.au

Before submitting your website to Google ...

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.Before you submit your website to Google, Google recommends you do the following:

* Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

* Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

* Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold(tm) that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links

* Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

* Don't send automated queries to Google.

* Don't load pages with irrelevant words.

* Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

* Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.

* Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

For more information visit: http://www.google.com/ or for Webmaster Guidelines, go to:

http://www.google.com.au/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Ivana Katz
Websites 4 Small Busines

http://www.web4business.com.au/