5 Ways to Get Free Online Publicity
Once you have a professionally designed small business website, brand and logo design, you probably want for your potential customers to take notice. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. Building online presence takes time, but small business owners need results as soon as possible. Here are five ways to promote your business without spending a dime.
Submit your website to the major search engines. All that time invested in having a website designed and search engine optimized will only pay off if you let the search engines know about it. Don’t wait for the crawlers to stumble upon your website; sign up for a webmaster account with the major search engines and submit your sitemap so they can index your information. Every time you change your website, resubmit it so the search engines know that you are constantly updating and changing information. Search engines are a valuable means of gaining interested traffic, so time spent wooing them will almost certainly pay off.
Become an authority. There are several ways of doing this. Call the media in your area and see if you can be their next filler story for a slow news day. Write articles and submit them to popular content sites. You probably know a lot about your field, so put this information to work. Be sure your web address is included in these and any other publications that feature your company.
Exchange links. Often there are businesses in the exact same boat as you are. Find these businesses and offer to exchange links with them. Make sure you aren’t dealing with direct competitors, however; you don’t want to lose the traffic you are working so hard to gain! Find businesses in related but not identical fields and approach them about link exchanges.
Make your social networks part of your brand. You probably have a Facebook or other social media account. Make sure your small business brand and an easy-to-follow link are front and center in each page. Social networking will only help your business if it is easy to get from your networks to your website and vice-versa.
Join a banner exchange. There are many banner exchanges out there that allow you to submit a banner that will be shown if you place other business’s banners on your own website. However, be careful with this technique. Sometimes having other companies’ banners may interfere with your own branding efforts and compete for attention with your logo design. There is also the danger that a competitor will end up advertising on your website. However, banner exchanges can be great sources of free advertising, so at least look into whether they will work for you.
Marketing your small business brand doesn’t have to be expensive; often, the free and creative ways of gaining publicity are even more effective than paid advertising. Don’t let a nonexistent marketing budget hold you back from getting the attention and site traffic that you need to succeed.
