NetMarketZine

There are a lot of ways that you can leverage the internet to promote your website or even your physical location. I’ll be writing about a few of these methods in this article.

You can submit articles to hundreds if not thousands of article directories that will help you promote your business. These articles will also help brand you as an expert in your field. Articles can be used to help you get search engine rankings as well.

Google has a service where it will list the local businesses in a specific geographic area based on searches as well. For instance, if you searched for “Salt Lake City plumber”, you’ll get a list of plumbers including a map listing of where those plumbers are located in SLC. Inclusion in this directory is free if you meet the criteria. This is a great way to get a number 1 listing in Google for a regionally specific keywords.

Another service similar to the local listings is Google base which is Google’s way of creating listings of events, products, photos, and just about anything else that people submit. This is a great way to get your products to show up in Google’s search listings. It doesn’t cost anything to list in Google Base and also has options for uploading spreadsheets.

Craigslist and other online classified ad websites can help also with generating traffic to your business or your physical location. These classified ad websites can get some significant traffic and I’ve used them many times to both list items for sale as well as purchase services. Coupon codes work very well on these sites because people are more likely to visit a site knowing that they have some “secret” coupon code for a certain percent off, or free shipping, or a flat dollar off coupon.

Social networking has grown significantly in the last few years online and you may have heard of this as “Web 2.0″. You can use a lot of these social networking sites to develop contacts who can benefit from your products and services. Just like the name implies, however, you’ll need to network with other people. The benefit to you if you’re a bit more on the shy side, or not usually extroverted, the internet provides a bit of a buffer and will allow you to get out there and form some relationships and get some additional business to your website.

Part of social networking is blogging and one of the central ideas around blogging is to initiate a “conversation” which is why blogs have commenting options. Individuals can comment on blogs and usually with a link back to their own website. Finding blogs related to the topics where your business can be promoted is as easy as searching for them on the search engines. In fact, Google has their own blog search engine at blogsearch.google.com

There are several things you can do to get traffic to your website and if you’re wiling to spend the time, you can get a lot of traffic for free. These are only a few of the methods that I use.