Advertise Your Website for Free
While paid advertising has its place its also important to know how to advertise your website for free.
Surprisingly a number of free sources can bring significant levels of traffic in their own right.
Using lots of free advertising helps to ensure that your website or blog has significant market coverage. This is important to act as a backstop for the times when search engines decide that your site is not for them.
The purpose of this post is to provide a range of free advertising options for you to consider. It will also reference some excellent free reports which cover the topics in some depth.
Where and how not to advertise
- FFA sites
- Porn, Hate or Warez sites
- Sites set-up specifically for link building
- Sites setup specifically for building page rank or SEO.
- Automated Traffic exchanges.
Stick with the tried and true “Good Neighbourhoods”. Ensure that links to your site are from pages related to its topic. Ensure that the anchor text contains the keywords you are trying to target.
“Natural linking” is what search engines like. They expect authority sites to build links slowly (no more than 10 per day is a good rule). Any use of “instant back links” is likely to result in the site in question being removed from search engine listings at least in the short term.
Search engines also expect that there would be a reasonable variance of anchor text. For example if you where targeting “dog collars”, you would have a range of links on the topic i.e. blue dog collars, green dog colors etc.
The best links to get are one way, from a page with a small number of outgoing links and a high page rank. However almost every link has some value & it should be taken unless it will disadvantage your site.
Where it consider advertising
- Free Classified Listings – Craigs list, Freeadvertising form, Fijiji, adland Pro and USFreeads are good examples. You can find a more detailed listing here
- Web Directories – There are a huge number of online directories accepting free submissions. An example is Web Directory1. Generally they require a reciprocal link to get a free listing. These are easy to get and will give good short term gain. However the gain tends to drop off with time as your listing is pushed down by other new submissions. There is an extensive list of free directories at vilesilencer, directoy listing
- RSS Directories – If you site doesn’t have an RSS feed get one. Then submit it to all the RSS directories you can find. These will serve your new material to a huge number of people. there is a list of blog and RSS directories here
- Blog Comments – Placing links on blog comments can give good results. Just be aware that most blogs have “no-follow” turned on their comments. This means that your link will get no “link-juice†but may still be of value from a traffic perspective. A good free tool to use to quickly find blog pages relevant to your subject is CommentHut. There is a paid version which works very well. The free version is still worth the effort download. It will save you a lot of time. A quick way to check for no-follow on links is to download the SEO for Firefox plugin.
- Article Submission – Write a short 500 word article, include the resource box at the bottom with links back to your site. Then submit the article to a good range of article directories. For best results submit a different version of the same article to each directory to avoid duplicate content. You will be rewarded in a couple of ways. Firstly with a bit of short term Page Rank from the directory. Secondly with traffic from the article directory, especially if the article is on a popular topic. Finally there are downstream effects as webmasters download your article and put it on their site. You never know where your article may end up. There is an excellent list of article directories here.
- Social Bookmarking Sites – These sites highlight web content which has been selected and voted popular by its members. A number of them allow you to publish your RSS feed. If your post is viewed as being popular then a significant amount of traffic can be generated to it. A first rate guide to social bookmarking is here
- Traffic Exchanges – These sites will send visitors to your site when you have visited other sites of other members. Generally the traffic doesn’t convert well, but it is instant and a good way to start your site promotion off. A good place to find the highest converting traffic exchanges is here. One traffic exchange with a slightly different model is TrafficSwarm. With this traffic exchange you get to choose the sites you visit by selecting an advertisement placed by the site owner. This does give better targeted traffic than the standard traffic exchange.
- Advertising Bars – There are advertising options which involve you installing an advertising bar on you browser. As you surf, advertising is displayed at the top of your screen. For each ad you see you are allocated points which in turn are able to be exchanged for advertising of your own. Check out Agloco .
- Yahoo & Google Answers and Mylot – These sites can be excellent advertising opportunities. Develop a solid reputation by answering questions fully and with some depth. Where appropriate add links to your site in the resource section. Where you see a pattern of questions in your niche, put up a post about that topic. You can then link to it for later answers. Sometimes the questions and answers achieve good rankings in search engines. Always include links to your sites in your user profile. As you build more authority, other readers will check out the profile and your site.
- Forum Posting – Three good advertising opportunities. Firstly you can generate traffic from the forum by including a link to your site at the bottom of every post. You do this by including it in your forum signature. Secondly some forums are well optimised for search engines and threads are often listed with good rankings. Always include your keywords when initiating threads in forums. Finally put a link to your web page in your forum user profile. As become well known, other forum users will check out your profile and your site. Here is a useful list of forums which have SEO friendly signature links
References:
Encyclopedia of Free Online Advertising
Post Info
You can follow any responses to this entry through the Comments Feed. You can Leave A Comment, or A Trackback.
Previous Post: Text Link Ads Discount Offer »
Next Post: CashCrate Get Paid To Complete Offers »
December 7th, 2009 15:58
Merry Christmas.
To tell you a good shopping site. Please visit www.expoitem.com.
December 18th, 2009 03:29
Useful article, very helpful to me.
January 5th, 2010 04:55
Thank you for taking the time to explain these resources to me.
I have a cabinet business, and need to find a way to be able to advertise without spending excessive amounts of time on the net.
Many of the methods I’ve seen seem to assume that THE business a person has IS the net rather than the net being a convenient way to get the word out about one’s skill.
January 26th, 2010 09:24
I like the ideas shown here, I write articles and submit them to quite a few places.
This gives me genuine links when they are place onto someones web or blog.
January 29th, 2010 07:39
This is a good list, though I have found that free directories are often not very helpful. It seems like the search engines put a lot less value on those links. Do you think that’s possible?
February 1st, 2010 12:05
what is the best way to get massive traffic and not lose your pants paying for it. ? reason is there are so many rippoffs out their. i do like what you said on this page, thanks.
February 2nd, 2010 17:08
Thank you, I am new to SEO and am trying to learn all I can!
February 8th, 2010 05:23
Great list… i was searching for it about an hour… i think best way to get traffic and good backlinks is article submitions websites
Thats my opinion
February 11th, 2010 16:42
Thank you for an awsome post! I love SEO and am always trying to get more traffice to my site. I will definately follow your tips. George Tallabas Real Estate Broker/Investor.
February 13th, 2010 16:19
I think this is all well and good. And, I appreciate and respect the depth of your knowledge and guidance.
However, I am a one person business, and need to spend my time developing skills and knowledge so I will have something to sell to folks.
It sounds like you are asking business people to spend a lot of time online for free, advertising their service that they haven’t been able to refine and stay current with because they are writing comments on blogs with the hope that someone somewhere will read them.
So, I suppose I am confused.
When does a solo business owner have the time to be writing dozens of posts a day and still be at the forefront of the knowledge and skill needed to provide a quality service.
And, that doesn’t even include actually providing the service itself, which I am assuming that a person would have to do if he/she didn’t want to starve to death while getting all that free advertising for a service that is falling further and further behind the knowledge curve every day.
I believe you have an answer to this dilemma I find my self in. I hope it has something to do with a balanced approach, and that is something I would love to hear you comment about in future articles.
Stetson
My favorite hobby shop:
ToysPeriod is a leading online shop specializing in lego sets and model railroad equipment.
February 24th, 2010 10:18
Very good article, full of informations. ^^
I already do all of them since i created my blog but i don’t recommand you to post links on MyLot community, it’s against the rules and you could be banned! (I’m a member there).
March 15th, 2010 23:35
Some great points there for advertising online for free.
Anyone that begins advertising must take into account that it will take time and you will not see results over night.
March 16th, 2010 23:26
Hey great post Free advertising is alway’s a good thing for the newbe markerter that is on a tight budget. I have save your blog on my computer.
Great Stuff
Dave :)
March 19th, 2010 03:27
hey dude
Great stuff! i got a lot of inspiration from this post
i went through this page four times
it is very interesting ….
am learning for social work
Thanks
March 25th, 2010 09:51
Thank you. In the industry that is as ruthless as real estate any thing I can do to get my website out in front of people is very important
March 25th, 2010 10:23
Wow, that is informative. Getting started is the hardest part about gaining any strength in the world of Internet marketing.
Helping each other out is our greatest strength and this post is a great example of that. Thanks!
March 26th, 2010 04:48
Good insight here. Did you all know how much the design of a website means to the success of the marketing campaign. If there is not proper internal linking, key words, and content your site might in turn be hurting you more than helping. Cheers!
April 12th, 2010 07:56
nice post but don’t forget that posting article in wordpress blog and installing the best free plugings is another way of getting high and quality pagerank to your online business
April 27th, 2010 07:14
Your rundown is very helpful and is a pretty complete list. I especially have had incredible succes with submitting articles to article directories. Those can be powerful places to gain visibility.
June 9th, 2010 18:40
I am just starting to promote my site and these info’s widened my knowledge. It will really help me as an affiliate marketer. Please continue posting informative blogs like this. Thanks.
July 1st, 2010 03:48
Great article! Thanks for sharing and keep them coming.
July 22nd, 2010 03:14
Your post is really good. It helped many people who wants
to promote their site inducing me also
Thanks
July 26th, 2010 15:23
I like your opinon, some advertising such as web directory adding, Social Bookmarking Sites, we often use! And some other advertisings is also useful to us.
July 28th, 2010 19:23
Excellent article! I have looked at many sites and not come across such a site as yours that tells you what you really need to know about affiliate marketing.