Cheap and Cheerful Ways to Promote Your Website and Make Money Online
Monday, 2 November 2009
These days, the ever expanding methods of promoting your website and business in order to make money online are many and varied. There are plenty of ways you can spend a small fortune on spreading the word about your business but there are also several cheaper and even free ways of achieving the same result. Let’s take a look at some of these free or very cheap ways of getting your website known on the ubiquitous worldwide web so that you can make money online with your chosen business idea.
Of course, the first thing you need in order to make money online is a window onto that worldwide web. That means either obtaining a professionally hosted website, which will cost money to set up or doing it cheaply or even for free by going down the free hosting route and either setting up a free website or one or more blogs and lenses.
The less said about free hosted websites the better. The simple truth is that if you want to make money online, don’t bother with a free website. They look terrible with all the irrelevant banner ads from the host and they are restrictive as far as bandwidth and storage goes.
Better to set up one or more free-to-host blogs or Squidoo lenses. At least you know what you’re getting and you can potentially set up as many as you can handle. Having said that, it will do your “make money online” business no good whatsoever trying to spam either of these methods with multiple copies of the same site – they’re wise to that trick and all it will get you is banned.
From a well set up and maintained blog or lens, you can promote affiliate products and services to make money online just as you would on your own website, with certain limitations like size and editing capabilities. But when you really need to start up your “make money online” business without a shred of start-up capital, this may be the only effective route for you to take.
However, if you can afford to set up your own, professionally hosted website, you will be in a much stronger position from day one. Even doing this can be relatively cheap, especially if you possess some website building skills. Then you only have to find the money for domain name registration and monthly hosting, which these days can be found at a very reasonable cost.
Prior to finding a domain name, you should spend a good deal of time and thought about which sector of the internet you see yourself making money from. In other words, you need to find a niche market. For your online business to succeed for you to make money online from, you should always choose a niche that you have an interest in and are knowledgeable about. This will make running the business interesting for you, which will reflect in your writing and ad copy that you will produce to promote it.
If you are interested and enthusiastic about something, that enthusiasm will be reflected in your content. This will filter down to your readers who will get a positive vibe from your site and be more inclined to want to buy from your business.
Once you have produced your website, the first thing you’ll need to do is to start to populate it with some good, readable content relevant to your chosen niche. Don’t copy from someone else. Always write it yourself or purchase it with full rights so no one else can have a copy. That way you won’t run afoul of the search engines who cast a doleful eye on duplicate content which could affect your chances of achieving high page rankings, which you will ultimately need to succeed.
Having created a good, interesting and content rich website, it is now time to use it to make money online. One of the best ways to start out is through affiliate marketing. This is simply advertising other people’s products through a third party company like Clickbank. Your business will receive commissions on any sales that are generated from people that came from your website via your affiliate link.
It’s important to select products relevant to your business niche. By signing up with Clickbank, which is free, you’ll have access to many hundreds of good saleable products and services that will relate to your niche. There are other affiliate companies around and it’s worth signing up with more than one of them to spread your options around.
Now that you have a good portfolio of affiliate products to sell, in order to make money online you need to get busy with the business of promoting your website. There are several effective and free or low cost ways of doing this.
The search engines see websites in terms of importance. The most important ones have the highest page ranks and the least important ones have the lowest. The most important, high ranking sites are ones that contain lots of good unique content, are interesting and therefore attract a lot of visitors. Websites like “You Tube” and “My Space” are examples of high ranking sites because they are loaded with a ton of content and attract literally millions of visitors every month.
Now, it’s unlikely you’ll attain such lofty heights, but not impossible, depending on how creative you are and if you can come up with something lots of people want to see. But when you’re just starting out, your business will be at the bottom of the pile and you need to improve that situation.
One way is through collecting what is known as back-links to your site. You need to achieve a good page ranking with the search engines in order to receive traffic from them and make money online. The way to improve that ranking is by procuring links from high ranking websites in your own niche. Obtaining back-links from other, higher ranked sites than yours is the way to go.
This is not always as easy as it sounds. That’s because plenty of high ranking website owners will not want to link to a low ranking site because it may hurt their own ranking. Sometimes you might get lucky if your site shows lots of potential to achieve a high ranking in the near future, but it had better be pretty darn good! If you believe that your site has that potential, then simply craft a well written email asking the owner for a reciprocal link with your chosen site and if they agree, you are in business!
Another way of obtaining back-links is by submitting your site to link directories. These are dedicated sites that offer to link you your site either for a small fee, or for free in return for a reciprocal link to their site.
Another way of promoting your site is through a newsletter. This harks back to the earlier point about choosing a niche that you are interested, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about. If you have plenty of knowledge to share about your niche, you can produce a newsletter and offer it to visitors to your site for free if they sign up with you. This also has the benefit of creating and building an opt-in list that you can sell to in the future.
Another free way of promoting your site is by writing articles and submitting them to article submission sites and e-zines. This is a great way of driving traffic to your site so you can make money online in greater amounts as well as generating more of those all important back-links from the e-zine or article directory. The more good, interesting and niche-relevant articles you submit over time, the greater the flow of traffic becomes and your “make money online” business will grow as a result.
The last free method of website promotion we will look at here is one that is often overlooked but is a fantastic source of targeted traffic to your website. This underrated resource is the many online forums that exist for just about every niche imaginable.
Forums are a great way of networking and making lots of good contacts in your business, but they are also a great resource for promoting your website. The vast majority of forums will not allow you to include links anywhere in your posts and this is a good thing as it prevents spamming, which forum members, moderators and administrators dislike intensely.
You may wonder how you can promote your website in forums if you can’t post your link.
That can be answered easily. When you become a forum member, you are given a member’s profile that you can update. Within that profile is a signature and it is in that signature that you are allowed to place a link to your website. So every time you post a relevant and interesting topic in a forum, lots of people will read it and also see your signature. If you have spent some time in the forum gaining the respect of the members by not posting rubbishy one liners or trying to spam your business all over the place, but by posting quality, interesting posts that add value to the forum, then those members will begin to click your signature link out of curiosity. If they like your website, they will most likely return often and also recommend it to their colleagues in other forums, thereby spreading the word for you.
In order to make money online successfully you could either throw a lot of money at paid advertising to drive traffic to your site, or spend some time and effort and generate that traffic yourself for free, or very cheaply. The methods outlined here will create that interest for you and as long as you keep the momentum going by staying on top of your promotional activities, you will end up generating a lot of quality, targeted traffic to your site, where you will make money online by selling your products and services to them. Because let’s be honest, at the end of the day your goal is to make money online successfully from your business.
If you found this article interesting and useful, then successful internet marketer and author Terry Didcott has built a creatively SEO’d blog and website that will give you some great ideas:
Make Money!
Its purpose is to help you learn how to effectively make money from your blog, website and online presence. Go ahead and click the link and see why your competitors are all flocking over there right now to see what all the fuss is about?
