How to Promote & Advertise business online free
The Internet is teeming with marketing platforms that don’t cost a dime—you just need to know where to look. You may not have wads of cash to spend on marketing in the early stages of your startup, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t effective ways to get your brand out there. Launching a website used to be a challenging task. Before the Internet, small businesses only had a few ways to market their products cheaply, through methods like printing out fliers or sponsoring little local events. Promoting your website to reach wider audiences is a multi-tiered process. One of the first steps is to find valuable websites and online platforms that allow you to highlight your site’s URL in one way or another. Now there are all kinds of opportunities out there on the Web—you just need to know where to look.
Online Directories for Businesses
Ranging from the most high-profile platforms to local directories, these websites cover a range of audiences. The flow is pretty much the same – you submit your website’s URL, as well as additional information about your business or organization. Registering your business with Business directories allows it to be found more easily on search engines. These sites, in turn, incorporate your info to their data banks, ensuring that your link is there when users are searching your content categories. In addition to direct display of your content, adding your links to these directories improves your site’s Search Engine Optimization, gradually improving your website’s ranking on search results.
Social Media Marketing
Social media isn’t just a tool to gain exposure—it has now become a necessary time investment for every business to make. Social media optimization will help you very easily and free of cost. You can tie in ads and offers on your Facebook page and have a direct channel with your customers on Twitter. Networking on LinkedIn—both at the personal and company level—can be another way to help your startup.
Social Bookmarking
While these websites also operate on the basis of link-submission, the emphasis here is on content. You could submit a link to the main page as well as to individual pages, products, posts, images etc. These platforms then circulate your content to their audience base and drive traffic into your site, while also helping to boost your SEO by connecting your links to textual descriptive content.
Start a blog writing
A blog not only helps your company get its name out through followers, but is a way to connect with your consumers more directly. But remember that one of the major keys of blogging is to keep your stream updated as frequently as you can. A dormant, abandoned blog is worth nothing. Search engines and social media networks can only understand one thing and that’s content. Whether its news, product information, text, images, video, infographics, reviews, user’s opinions, forums, questions; you need content in order to be able to promote your business online. Maintaining an interesting and well-written blog is a way to draw customers in and keep them involved in your business. Be sure that you post frequently enough to hold customers’ attention
Join a relevant online community and contribute
Every niche has communities online that you can get involved in. But just signing up for a forum and posting every once in a while about your business isn’t beneficial for anyone, and will likely just annoy people. Actively contribute and build a rapport with the community, while keeping your business out of it. Passively promote your business by putting a link in your signature or mentioning it only when the context is appropriate.
Optimize your business website for search engines
Creating a website is the first step, the second step is to make sure that your website is search engine friendly. Search engine optimization or SEO as it is widely known is a set of changes you need to do on a website so that it can be understood by search engines. The more information you give to search engines about your website, the greater are your chances of receiving traffic from them.
Press Releases
This can be a great way to get your business’ name in a widely-read publication. Just be sure that you have a reason to do so, whether it is a new product or a sales record. Keep in mind that you will also have to submit a properly formatted and grammatically correct press release to be published.