Starting a Free Online Business – Promotion
Aside from other techniques for starting a free online business, this section will focus on promotion. Promotion online has many similarities to that which would be used in a conventional business, not online. In the case of someone who is starting a free online business, you will not only need to know how to accomplish these tasks for free, but you also need to know how and where to do them. The following article will outline some practices which will help you to promote your online business by promoting your business website for free.
The first step is to install a blog on your business website. Wordpress offers completely free blogging software that is user friendly to install and to use. The next thing to do is to write short articles in the blog which talks about your product. They don’t have to be sales pieces though. For example, if you are selling books you can write a book review on the blog. Then the most important part of promoting your free inline business in this way is to take that blog entry and link the title of the book and anywhere that you reference anything else on the website and create a hyperlink to that page.
The next step is you have to create backlinks to that blog entry. This can be best done through social bookmarking and online article writing, but there are other methods. First go to a site such as social poster and sign up for the DOFOLLOW social bookmarking sites. Then submit your articles to all of them. Only do a couple per day though because you don’t want to be a spammer. They can get banned from the sites easily. Next, go to sites like eHow, bukisa, associated content and ezinearticles and write articles about your site. These are a bit more sales oriented, but they have to be providing the site what they are asking for. So, like eHow is a how to site so you have to tell someone how to do something in addition to linking to your article. Many of these types of sites only give NOFOLLOW links, but they still drive traffic. You can also get bookmarks by doing directory submission or blog linking like what is done on Blog Carnival.
Another thing to be aware of when promoting a free online business is the sitemap. Make sure you have a sitemap that is set up for Google and other search engines. Also make sure your site has been added to the crawl list for all the major search engines. Make note, you do not have to keep adding your articles. The site only needs to be added once. Another great way to get backlinks is to allow others to sell your product for you on their websites by setting up an affiliate program. This will create a piece of code on their site that links to yours so that you get a backlink in addition to possibly getting some sales that you don’t have to work for.
