10 Ways To Advertise Your Home Business For Free

February 15th, 2008 | by Chris |

Free advertising. The dream of every Marketer. There are dozens of ways to do so and hundreds of combinations that you can try. Unfortunately not all of them are effective and many are simple a waste of time. But there are a few highly effective ones that can start bringing you traffic from the same day.

Although I do believe that you shouldn’t rely solely on free advertising, since paid methods can give you more targeted traffic and willing buyers, free methods have their place when done right and should be included in your overall strategy. Of course, don’t forget that it may not cost you in money but it still cost you in time.

So here are the 10 ways that can help you advertise and get traffic to your website for free while at the same time remain highly effective and won’t waste your precious time for nothing.

1. Forum Posting

The Magic word here is your forum signature. The place where you can put your link pointing to your site as well as a short message to entice the readers. Of course, needless to say that spamming won’t get you anywhere. You should participate and contribute to the community with useful posts in order to work.

2. Article Marketing

Write articles and distribute them through article directories. Here the magic word is the resource or authors box. There you can put a link to your website and of course write your small message to intrigue the reader to click for more. Another good thing with article marketing, besides the traffic, is that can help you greatly at the same time with your seo efforts.

3. Social Bookmarks

They are sites that you can bookmark your favorite sites and share them with other users. What you should do is bookmarking pages of your website that are of great value and worth sharing. Don’t try to bookmark everything you write cause it would lost its effect.

4. Blog Comments

Find high traffic blogs in your niche and participate in the discussions there. Don’t try spamming cause your comments would get deleted or in the best case nobody would take you seriously. Like forum posting you should contribute value. If other readers find your comments useful and intelligent may visit your site.

5. Use Squidoo

Squidoo is a free platform for building webpages called lenses but it also has more features as you can interact with other members by rating their lenses and leaving comments in their guestbook. After you set your own start visiting other lenses and rate them leaving useful comments in the guestbook. Most of them would repay your visit and rate yours increasing its rankings and gaining visibility. Of course your mission is to drive traffic from your lens to your own site.

6. Free Press Releases

Although paid one give the best results. Submitting free press releases can still get you traffic, especially if do your homework well and target long tail keywords. Then you may watch it appearing in the search engines for your chosen keyword.

7. Use Videos

Upload small videos in video sites like Youtube and of course don’t forget to put your url in the about the video section. Some may like the video and click your link.

8. Social Networks

Don’t try to spam everyone there cause you are loosing your time. What you should do is Networking with like minded people, join related groups and contribute to them. If you bring value and they realize that you are a serious entrepreneur you can get traffic and prospects from there.

9. Submit Your RSS feed

If you are writing a blog submit your RSS feed to various Rss directories. If you don’t blog yet, what are you waiting for? Having your own blog can greatly help you in building your business.

10. Classifieds

Not to every site you can find, but to ones with high traffic first. If you can write long ads you can target long tail keywords and besides the traffic from the site your ad may appear in search engines organic results for your keywords.

Technorati Tags: Free, Advertising, Traffic, Home Business, Ways, Methods, Marketing