E-Biz Booster Blog

The following article contains 13 free and inexpensive ways for you to promote your website.

1. Viral Marketing is an approach that persuades people to pass along your message. Like a virus, the message then spreads to more and more people. The persuasion to pass along the message typically comes in the form of humor. If one person thinks the ad, email, video, etc. is funny and/or entertaining, they will pass it on to their friends. If you’re creative, give this a try.

2. Creating a blog, or web log, is becoming more and more popular. A blog will allow you to create a running commentary focused on your products or services. Interested parties will have access to this running log information. WordPress and Blogger are two of the most popular blogging platforms, and both are free to use.

3. Joining an affiliate program will cost a bit of money but can make a huge impact if you’re selling merchandise. Interested parties join your program and sell your products. When they make a sale, you pay them a set commission.



4. What better way to grab people’s attention than to offer them something for free. Using free giveaways like sample products or offering a free consultation is a great way to grab people’s attention and to garner more interest in your products or services.

5. Posting articles focused on your products or services is a great way to promote your business. People are constantly surfing the internet for the latest tips, tricks, and advice… just like you. Adding links in your articles that refer readers to your website is a necessity to increase traffic.

6. Target your audience. Join forums and other online groups that are within the scope of your business, products, or services. Be sure to supply these forums or groups with a steady stream of applicable information. Constant, focused information is a great way to catch a prospective customer’s attention.

7. Make prospective clients feel wanted and special. When your marketing does draw prospects to your site, you want to close the deal. Make someone browsing your website feel good about themselves, and try to relay how much better they’ll feel when they buy what you’re selling.

8. Purchase business cards and company stationary. Use these two for any and all correspondence. Whether it is something personal or related to your website, the more hands you can put your stationary and/or business cards into, the more likely you are to increase site traffic and sales.

9. Sponsoring events is a great way to get your company name in the public eye. Depending on the type of event, sponsorship packages will vary in price. Make sure to select events that are likely to draw your customer demographic and give you the most exposure for your buck.

10. Focus on your uniqueness. While promoting your website, you need to focus on the things that set you apart from your competition. My online business, OBrienMaDe, is an online social marketing company. Our homepage clearly tells prospective clients what sets us apart from the myriad of other marketing companies on the internet. Check it out for yourself- http://www.obrienmade.com.

11. Use e-mail and snail mail campaigns. Obviously, we don’t want to spam prospects or bombard them with junk mail, but you do want to use a calculated mail campaign. Almost everyone has a large database or personal e-mails. Start by advertising to your friends and family; you never know what might come of it. Also, mail out ads to your demographic… and be sure to use company stationary.

12. This one is a no-brainer, but just in case here you go… create a webpage. Having an online presence is very vital. If you’re an online business you have a website, if you’re a brick and mortar establishment you may not have a site. At the very least, create a single web page highlighting your offerings. There are many free web hosting providers you can use. Just search “Free Web Hosting”.

13. Google AdWords offer pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for businesses. Your ad will appear in the Google search engine. When someone clicks on the ad and is directed to your website you pay an amount of money pre-determined by you. You can establish a budget that is not to be exceeded. Once your PPC reaches your monetary limit, the ad will no longer be visible to web surfers.

If you would like help establishing and running a social media marketing campaign, or creating a website, please feel free to visit http://www.obrienmade.com or email: <info[at]obrienmade.com>.

About the Author

Tom O'Brien is owner and operator of OBrienMaDe, an online business focused on helping small businesses increase online visibility and traffic.

Image source: ©2007 by Danard Vincente/flickr (↑) - Some rights reserved. - CC-BY 2.0.

This article has been originally posted on GoArticles.com - The Web’s Largest Free Content Article Directory (↑)

Okay, now it is official.

Google finally announces that page loading time has become one of the ~200 signals (↑) that influence rankings in its search engine. If you are a little bit tech savvy when it comes to web technologies, check out the post. There you’ll find resources and tips on how to tackle the issue.

The Google Webmaster tool (↑) also offers a new function at Dashboard / Labs / Site Performance which gives you a hint how your site is doing right now.

I already told you in September, 2009, how to speed up your website.

Now it’s time to get going.

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I just have read a not so bad blog post. However, when I checked out the about page I got turned off.

“This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.”

Come on. You can do better than that.
And you should.

Anybody who is getting serious about putting your blog in their RSS reader or subscribe to your e-mail list will want to know more about you.

The about page is a great place to let your readers know who you are, what you can do for them, and why they should listen to you.

But first things first.

Some Ideas For An Entrepreneurial About Page

• You have a name, haven’t you. Use it. Introduce yourself with a short bio. … or introduce each team member who writes in the blog on a regular basis.
  
  
• Of course we want to see your photo(s). A nice photograph makes it more personal. You do not want to miss this step.
  
  
• What problems can you help the readers with?
  
  
• Why are you qualified to help them?
  
  
• Tell them how they can stay in touch with you. An optin form on the about page i snot such a bad idea. However, remember the good rule of thumb: “One page, one action.” Don’t offer too much.
  
  
• By the way: Have you ever thought of putting a personal video message (↑) on your about page? I guess, it’s time to do that.

Now go to work.
You don’t have to get it perfect.
5 % better than your competitors will do.


Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: I just realize I should update the about page of my own as, well.

P.P.S.: In the context of legal issues with online publishing, you MUST NOT have an anonymous blog anyway. Pen names are fine, but readers, customers, and the government must be able to contact you based on the information on your website without having to go through hoops. (I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice!)

P.P.P.S.: Do you have anything to add? Any comments? I am sure you have. Let me know.

Recently I have described how I fixed a wrong setup of the tweetmeme button on my blog. I manually modified the blog template and I only mentioned briefly there is a Wordpress plugin for Tweetmeme.

Acknowledging Wordpress as the most popular blogging platform I need to follow up with a more detailed description of the Tweetmeme WP Plugin.

The installation and configuration is straightforward and shouldn't be a problem for anyone who has installed Wordpress on her hosting account successfully.

I provide some screenshots for your orientation.

Update Dec. 21, 2009: I made a screencam video of the procedure as well.

How To Setup A Tweetmeme Button On A Wordpress [HQ video] (↑)

Installation of the Wordpress Tweetmeme Plugin

You can download the plugin from Tweetmeme (↑) or directly install it with the Wordpress Admin Interface.



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A couple of days ago I have removed my do-it-yourself Tweet-it button and put the button from Tweetmeme (↑) on this blog.

It's more encouraging for website visitors to retweet a story that already has been retweeted a lot. People follow the crowd.

Besides that the button looks pretty, too.



However, as simple as it is to put a button on a blog or website I still got it wrong.

Browsing the Web I can see that I am not alone.

Therefor I decided to write a short article about how to get Tweetmeme up right.


The problem on my site was as follows:

• Blog visitor clicks the tweetmeme button
• A new window opens
• (If they have not done this previously, they need to authorize tweetmeme for their twitter account. Eventually they also need to login to Twitter.)
• The following text is suggested for being retweeted:

Do you spot what's wrong?

At first, it should be my twitter username that's retweeted, shouldn't it be.

Secondly, the text is not really informative or encouraging a retweet, isn't it.


Thanks to Andy Beard (↑) for shooting a quick email to me and pointing this out. Andy is someone whose suggestions got picked up by the tweetmeme developer team (↑) after his blog post in May, 2009. Now Andy uses Tweetmeme on his blog.

Setting Up The Tweetmeme Button Correctly

Obviously I have screwed up this rather simple task. Shame on me.

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About three weeks ago I euphorically wrote about Google Wave, had a Wave embedded in the blog post, got a lot of comments, … and did many things with Wave in the meantime.

Since then I also have started a list with my humble suggestions for improvement of the user experience.

Let me give you a quick update on my personal Wave experience.

Status Quo

Wave has already become a sort of everyday tool for me. My firefox plugin shows the number of unread messages in the inbox and the number of people I communicate with is on the rise.

We even use the ties from Wave into Google Groups to create private Waves with restricted access. Therefore, with a small circle of partners and friends Wave has partially replaced email for some communication needs.

Never having been fond of walkie-talkie style instant messaging or chat conversation or Twitter the feature of instantaneous, collaborative, style of communication is certainly a great one. And Wave crushes it. We nailed communication which would have taken much more effort and time for accomplishing the same results via email, chat, skype or phone.

Brilliant Concept

The concept of hosted conversations with synchronous access for working collaboratively is just brilliant. The real power comes from the combination of — the removal of the barrier between — synchronous and asynchronous collaboration in one tool, one document.

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