While it's great to start and run your own home based internet business, if you don't get traffic and visitors to your website, you're really just spinning your wheels. But money for advertising can be non-existent in the early days so you have to be creative about promotion. Here are some indirect ways to promote your business and gain more traffic for your site.
Getting one-way links is always preferable to link exchanges and getting links on the top 10 or 20 Websites that use the same keywords and phrases you use is ideal. You can, of course, buy ad space on those sites, but usually there are more affordable, i.e., free, ways to connect.
1. Follow them on twitter and respond to their posts so you can build a relationship. Re-tweet some of their posts and give them a chance to get to know you. While it may not provide a direct link to your site, building a relationship will always make for good results in your marketing efforts.
2. Join their forum and become a regular participant. Be sure to include a signature file with a link to your website that is automatically added to every post. Then post. Ask and answer questions, comment on other member posts and become a part of the community, in general.
3. Offer the webmaster a free ebook you wrote or own rights to as a giveaway to their visitors. You can then ask her to link to the book on your website or include contact information and a link in the book itself. Ideally, they'll do both!
4. Post an ad in their free classifieds.
5. Sign their guest book and include a link to your site in your signature.
6. Subscribe to their blog posts and leave a valuable comment on a post you enjoyed or found helpful.
7. Suggest a joint venture proposal where you promote each other's products or services and link to each other's Websites.
8. Suggest a thank you page swap. You put a link to their site or ezine on your thank you page and they do the same for you.
9. Trade ezine ads or website links. You can throw in some bonus ads if they get more traffic than you.
10. Write a positive review of their site, products or services and publish it on your blog or website. You can let the webmaster know you wrote it and send them a link inviting them to link to the review on your site.
11. Write a testimonial about a product or service you bought from the website and include a link to your site in your signature.
12. Write an article for the site. Include a resource box at the end of the article and ask that the link be made live and clickable.
Be creative and look for ways to get your link posted on other sites. Before you know it, you'll see a real increase in targeted traffic because the sites you're promoting to are in the same niche as yours.
Tags: home based internet business, home business promotion, internet business, Internet Marketing, link exchange, website marketing
posted by HomeNetPro
