Free or Low Cost Ways to Market Your Website

Regardless if you have a product, a service, a hobby website or just want to share pictures of your wedding, you have to advertise somehow to get the traffic to your site or blog. Take for example all of the many different 'surf for traffic' or 'pay per click' programs that are out there. If you have a website that is about your hobby, say model airplanes, then what good is this traffic really going to do you? Who's using these services? You could be using Google Adwords or even 12 Daily Pro. Webmasters and marketers that want traffic on their own site. So they most likely won't spend any more time on your page than is required by the little timer these services use and then they are gone again. Even if your site is about these traffic services (this is about the only time you will see very much benefit from using such a tool) you will still have to spend a ton of time just surfing and clicking around to get a real benefit from these programs. Once marketers realized this they switched gears. They started promoting all the different programs to a lot of other marketers to get them in their downlines, so they could get some traffic as a bonus. This became their new focus. The problem is that everyone else did exactly the same thing, so not a lot of people were surfing the internet anymore. Bottom-line is this. You need targeted traffic. So here are some tips on how you can generate exactly the traffic you need and bring the visitors you want to your website without having to chase after them. 1. Your Copy What is your website about? Do you just have a page with a lot of links and not much else? Effective copy is the key to getting sales from your website. You really need to have others proof your website for clarity and copy. If you can not take the constructive criticism, then get thinker skin. If this is the case, think about adding some copy to your website that will be of value to any potential visitors. You could write articles or find articles at one of the many directories that you can reprint on your site. 2. Have references in your subject matter. You don't have to put up some all kinds of pictures (although that can work too), but rather try getting referral about what you are doing and what you are like to work with, as it relates to your topic of choice. 3. Forums and bulletin boards. You could add a forum or bulletin board to your website where your visitors can interact with each other. There are a lot of free services available out there that you can use to either remotely host a forum for you, or even software you can install on your website's server. To find some of these, just head over to your favorite search engine and you will definitely find plenty to choose from. And while you are visiting the search engine, why not run a search for any bulletin boards and forums that are already out there for your chosen topic? You could visit those and interact with the visitors there and since many allow you to post a signature or a profile, you could add a little line about your own site with a link (just check the rules of the forum first so you don't violate any of them). 4. Start a blog. Blogs are very popular and search engines love them because they provide constantly new and fresh content. Your blog would be a great place to talk about what you are up to that day. So if you spent some time today buying new parts for your plane you could write about where you found them, how much they cost you, why you chose those parts, anything really goes. The really great part about this is that you can point links from your blog back to your website, so when the search engine stops by to grab and index your latest content, it will also stop by your website and you will start seeing very targeted traffic heading your way. 5. Write articles. Writing articles isn't hard and can be a great source of fresh, new traffic to your website. There are a lot of ezines on any topic out there and there are also a lot of directories where you can share your article. Basically, what you do is write an article and then add a small resource box that links back to your website (just like a signature) and then let other ezine publishers know that you are allowing them to print your article in their ezine. And many publishers go to the article directories to find new content for their newsletter and even their websites. And since there are websites and ezine newsletters on any imaginable topic out there, you can't lose. Write an article every couple of days and post it in the directories (even one a week or every two weeks will start getting you traffic). Very soon you will find new traffic coming from search engines, newsletters and websites. Best of all, these 5 simple tips will bring targeted traffic, meaning the visitors are coming to you because they are interested in what you wrote. So there you have it, 5 easy and simple ways to advertise and drive traffic to your website at absolutely no cost.