After you've spent a good chunk of time and/or money to build the site of your dreams and create the product that would bring you a lot of profit it is time to start thinking about promotion. But how do you get traffic if you are just starting out and have no advertising budget?
By providing valuable content and promoting it steadily day after day, month after month. No serious person would believe on the online ads that says start making money within days. Those times are long gone or reserved only for the gurus in the business with 10+ years of practice.
What you need is as many links as possible relevant to your topic pointing to various pages on your website to beat your competitors. How do you do that?
You need a Plan.
Below is a step by step guide that includes attracting links and traffic with 0$ investment, just your time.
In order to execute your actions you need to be prepared with the right tools at hand. It is kind of boring but you have to set up around 100 accounts:)
Pre steps:
Describe your topic - based on the topic of your website you need to find a list of networks and website you can promote your content on. For example sphinn.com for online marketing or sylehive.com for clothes. They are out there just find them. Once you have 5-10 of those networks you need to create accounts and feature your content. Here are the other places you need to be in.
Websites to create accounts at:
SocialMarker.com - use this free tool to automate content promotion and bookmarking. / choose most relevant websites to your topic - say 5 - 10 /
Ping.fm - Get on as many social networks as you can here. Use this free tool to let your connections know when you have good content on your site. Usually I would leave twitter, facebook and linked in where you manually post your updates. REMEMBER: Social Networks are called social because they are Social not Business. Although you are a business and want to profit, keep a good ration about your updates try to talk 50/50 about yourself and you business/service. If you tweet business only people will not likely buy from you because they have not had the chance to know the person behind the product.
Yahoo answers - Use this service to answer questions related to your services. Still highly valuable and featured in search engine results.
Forums - Become a member of forums related to your topic so you can comment.
Now that you have created all those accounts / wow, you need a spreadsheet for that :)/ it is time to set up a plan for success.
Content Promotion Action Plan
Daily
- Create 1 or more pieces of content (text, images)
- Social Bookmark your content
- Use ping.fm to post on your social networks
- Update Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed /the networks you enjoy the most/
Weekly
- Leave 3-5 comments on other blogs that have relevant content to your topic
- Resolve 1 -3 issues on yahoo answers or forums related to your topic
- Post 3-5 forum posts answering people's questions on forums
- Create a video tutorial for your prospects on a task related to your business that they will find useful
Every 2-3 Months
- Review your keyword trends, adjust your content and targeting.
- Release a 15 - 20 page report about your industry and offer it for free in exchange for people's emails. Your email list and your twitter followers can serve you great in assessing your service and product quality.
Every 6 months
- Organize a live Q&A Webinar about your business.
This simple 8 point plan is so powerful that guarantees you will dominate your market within 8 months of starting your online business. Of course, given you do everything the right way and your niche is not "travel" or "real estate":).
Following my post about building a high quality website for less than a 100$ I would like to provide an overview of one of the best engines that run today's websites - Joomla .
I cannot explain it better than the community itself so if you want to learn more about it go to their about page
Joomla is an open source platform you can download and use without paying a license fee. It provides the code upon you build a great website with no technical knowledge which includes:
- quick creation of menus, pages, modules to display banners, ads and etc.
- create users and assign access levels
- easy use of multiple templates to change website design
A good way to start with joomla is their documents wiki . However, I believe that like most of you I found a lot of this stuff confusing at first and I was under short deadlines to learn the system so I bought this book
It is very good book that helped me learn Joomla much quicker. It takes you from A to Z. One of the very good chapters is on SEO practices.
Search Engine Optimization of your Joomla site is an easy task once you have done keyword research, bought a domain and chosen hosting provider.
There are two ways to go about it: use out of the box SEO capabilities or use a component/plugin.
I would recommend using a component/plugin like sh404sef because it provides some features that are good for seo that you can do right out of the box with joomla /301 redirects, patching security holes, assigning sef ursl on popular modules and etc./
Combined with a tool like JCrawler to refresh and submit your sitemap to the search engines you will have a pretty well optimized Joomla Site.
You might have questions if you are new to Joomla and I will be happy to answer them. I was recently included in the Joomla Resources Directory as a reliable resource for SEO advice.
Learn how to start-up and market your own Internet business. Yaro Starak shares his knowledge through how-to articles and podcast audio recordings on Internet business, online marketing, search engine optimization, e-commerce and entrepreneurship.
SEOmoz, a Seattle-based search engine optimization company, serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services.
