Let's say you have a great concept for a web site but you don't know where to start. You start checking into web hosting and pay their fee. Great, now you have the ability to get online but you have nothing drafted yet. You need a site developed with the content you specify and some additional functionality which requires some expertise. So you hire a few IT moonlighters and voila! A few weeks (or months) later and your site gets published. You are on the web, ready to do business.
Then you start to realize that was the easy part.
We are not all sales and marketing experts but the web mandates some marketing savvy if you ever hope to get anyone to even see, let alone purchase, your products or services. If you are a true newbie, you really can't go at it alone. You need two things - you need to know that you need help, you need to find the right help.
And since your meager budget to start with has already been depleted, you might like to know about some great deals. There are many companies offering similar services to the list below but I think you will find these competitive prices very attractive.
Here is a list of the top five promotion strategies found on the internet today which can expose your blog, web site, product, service, or ideas to literally millions of people in a short period of time...
Search Engine & Web Directories Submission Service
For only $36, they will expose your site to hundreds of search engines and web directories for an entire year. They have over 150 million searches per month in their network. Apart from the low fee, the next best feature about their services is there are no PPC charges! You don't even have to bid for your keywords. A great service and the deal is hard to beat.
The only other service provider that comes close and may even be equal or better is EntireWeb.
For only $36, they will expose your site to hundreds of search engines for an entire year. The nice part about EntireWeb is they not only list your site within 48 hours of submission, but also they re-index your site every 48 hours for the entire year. Plus they offer extensive crawling information and a free XML search results feed.
You will find it tought to beat either of these offers for their offerings. You must be in the search engines and the sooner the better. Make sure you have a good META tag in your site's description. Make sure to have accurate, selective, a few META tag keywords chosen. Don't think that having more keywords will make your site any more attractive to a search engine. It will be just the opposite affect so choose wisely. I suggest 15-20 keywords.
If you have frequent and fresh content, you don't want to overlook pagerank with Google. This is a measure of your link popularity, how many sites are linked to you. This is a valuable component for search engine optimization. You need that credibility and you need the exposure. There are a number of companies that can do this for you but here is one that is affordable and builds up your link popularity with both social bookmarking site and link directories...
For only $75, they will manually register your site to 100 social bookmarking sites and 1,000 link directories. If you ever tried to register for either a social bookmark or link directory, you will appreciate this service a great deal. If you have never done this task, suffice to say you are saving yourself days if not weeks of time and effort. For me, realizing that it was going to take more than a few hours, I would rather pony up the fee that spend my time doing that much manual entry. Their staff does all the manual entry for you. You are guaranteed permanent one-way links and the sites are all search engine friendly. They claim that once indexed (which happens within 1-2 days), Google indexes and updates very fast.
All their links and directories are constantly reviewed and verified. They support many titles and descriptions and even provide a complete submission report. Again, it would be tough to beat that price for the value.
Direct Traffic
Part of your marketing plan should include sending direct traffic to your site. It doesn't have to be the lion's share of the budget. In fact, it should probably be less than 25% of your budget. You have to gauge which is more effective. You need to do some math and calculate how much money exposes you to how large of a market, and is it the right market, a targeted market, or not. One place to start is with wholesale traffic.
For not more than $50, you can drive 1,000,000 visitors to your site within 60 days. That's a fantastic deal! If you have any questions, they will get back to you within 24 hours. Some traffic providers don't even reply to their emails. These guys have Adserver generated traffic with traffic pacakges from 15,000 to 1,000,000 visitors. They have multiple traffic sources which route all traffic to one url per campaign. They don't use anything illegal like spam or bulk emailing techniques either. All campaigns launch within 24 hours and the traffic keeps coming for 20-60 days depending on how much traffic you order.
For only $40, you can advertise to over 1,000,000 ezine subscribers who read their email every day and support one another. This is a 100% opt-in group of ezine readers so there is no spamming involved. It's essentially a safelist. Plus they have an eZine Promotion Resource Center and many bonuses included with your fee. That is a great way to have a large group of people find out more about your site.
The last method is only too obvious - free advertising venues. Specifically, you want to get your site into online classifieds with very high traffic. The best one is Craigslist. You can visit www.craigslist.com and create an account (for free), post anything you want (for free), and have your ad exposed for 14 days. They get millions of hits per month. Google Pagerank (PR) of 8 which is very high because they are hugely popular.
Need Professional Help?
This is a professional Google Adwords management service which falls outside of the scope of the Top 5 affordable services listed above, however, their services are affordable if you want to break into Pay-Per-Click advertising eventually. PPC advertising is not the cheapest advertising, but it does drive the most relevant visitors assuming you have picked good keywords. This service provider figures out all those details for you. They create custom business-specific ads written by Adwords experts. They create custom keyword lists which are optimized for your entire ad campaign. They provide you a dedicated account manager. For $5, you can give them a test drive for 14 days. After the trial, it costs $60 per month for their services. After that cost, you only need to determine your Adwords budget. The minimum is $30 per month ($1 a day). They guarantee you will be listed within 48 hours. If you can figure out Adwords on your own, you will save $60/month but then you have to know what you are doing or you will waste alot of money.
One last strategy that is "off the radar" for this article but is definitely worth mentioning is the use of doorway pages.
For only $50, you can buy a product like Doorway Page Wizard which does all the tedious work for you. Basically, the concept is to create web pages with content that is related and relevant to your site which the search engines can index readily. This makes it easier for people to find your web site when they do a search. Without the use of Google Adwords, by using doorway pages, you can increase the chances of people finding your site from the "organic" search. That is the normal free search results that Google sends you after a search. The very top and right are the sponsored ads.
After spending many hours searching and comparing different products and services, I hope you find these suggestions useful and affordable. Once you have some successful campaigns running and some revenue comes in, you can increase or diversity as necessary.
