How to Promote My Business Online for Free

How to Promote My Business Online for Free – As a small business owner or just starting out on your own, you have a limited budget. You want to spend every dollar promoting your business but you don’t have the funds to do a lot of expensive advertising online.

The internet is full of marketing champs, and their advice can be very confusing for someone new.One of the most crucial aspects for growing your business is by marketing.

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Guest post on blogs

Free traffic—as opposed to paid traffic that comes from things like purchased ads—is often hard to come by for new websites. You can start blogging to drive traffic, but it takes time before you start seeing results. While you grow your own audience, guest posting gives you a way to get in front of someone else’s. Not only does this drive traffic back to your website, but the links to your site will help with search engine optimization.

Find and connect with bloggers who have the type of audience you want to reach. Offer to write a guest post that their audience will love. Make sure the topic you write about is also related to your business or it won’t drive any traffic.

Get product reviews

Getting your product reviewed can be a great way to spread awareness and drive sales. Instead of waiting around for someone to review your product, use a blogger outreach campaign to get the ball rolling. You may end up landing a product review in outlets like Buzzfeed, like Shopify merchant RT1home.

Contact bloggers with relevant, engaged audiences and offer to send them new products for free in exchange for an honest review. If you have a great product, they’ll love it and tell everyone.

Google My Business

It would be sort of ridiculous to not include Google My Business as the first place you should have your business advertised for free. After all, you have just spent a ton of time, effort and cash to make certain that your web site was search engine optimized for Google. With Google business you have the potential of being found within the nearly 8 billion searches that occur every day. With Google My Business your physical location and phone number can be linked to Smartphone app users so they can easily navigate to your door. Link up your other social media channels too.

Here’s how: Register your business at Google My Business in order to take advantage of the power of this top ranked directory and to get your some free business advertising love!

Optimize Your Website For Search Engines

What is the first thing that people do when they are planning to buy something? Well, they search for that product or service on Google. First they try to collect as much information as they can about the product and then they search for vendors who sell that product. So, if your website is not appearing in Google search, that means you virtually do not exist.

How can we fix this? Easy way to is to hire someone who can optimize your website for search engine but even in that case you need to be aware of the process, otherwise you might end up getting penalized by Google. For example, multiple broken links on your website and push your rank down on Google.

Its not very difficult to learn these techniques. Below are some links to get you started :

Beginners Guide to SEO.
Google’s SEO Guide in Hindi
Comprehensive Guide to SEO

By reading these guides, you can tweak your website and rank higher on Google and other search engines. Even if you chose to hire an SEO agency, they won’t be able to fool you if you are aware of the process.

Social bookmarking and curating

While social bookmarking and curating websites operate on the basis of link submission, the emphasis here is on creating quality content. Like social media platforms, they function as entertaining browsing experiences for users while simultaneously serving as online advertising tools for businesses.

By circulating your content on these sites, you can subtly promote your product and gently guide users toward your website. At the same time, you’ll improve your SEO by placing inbound links to your company across the web.

Classified ad websites

Classified ads are small advertisements – often free of charge – placed in newspapers, magazines or online boards. By posting on dedicated classified ad platforms, you can generate backlinks to your company site and market your business to potential customers. Adding your company name and URL to these free advertising sites is a quick, simple and affordable way to gain exposure.

Do an expert roundup

While blogging is a great way to drive traffic back to your store, it can be a lot of work. This is especially true if you don’t feel very knowledgeable on a topic you need to write about, or you’re not generally comfortable writing. One way around this is to solicit contributions from other bloggers or experts.

Seek out experts on a topic and ask them to contribute an idea, such as a tip, recipe, or story to your blog post. Then, publish a list of all the responses you got back. You’ll be providing your audience with great content from relevant experts, plus the contributors will want to share the article with their own readers, increasing your own reach.

Find affiliates to promote your business

If you want to take product reviews a step further and solicit even more people to promote your product, consider starting an affiliate program. Affiliate marketing incentivizes other people to drive traffic to your business by offering a commission on every sale, similar to referral programs.

MapQuest/Yext

You might remember MapQuest. Well, MapQuest has partnered with Yext in order to facilitate locating your business, business address and phone number. It is also worth noting that MapQuest’s mobile app still shows up with Google Maps, so it is still a great way to help people find you.

Here’s how: Add your business and unleash the power of MapQuest w/Yext to build recognition of your brand.

List On Google My Business (Local Business Listing)

Google is making search personal and now displays results that are tailored for your location. For example, if you search for a McDonalds, it will show you the one in your city with a map. So, it has almost become mandatory for a business to get listed on Google Local.

Google has made it easy to add & manage your location on map. You can also manage your Google Plus profile from the same place. Just head over to Google My Business and claim your listing. If you don’t have a physical shop, you can even add your office location and give details about your business.

Superpages

One of the easiest business listings for users to navigate, Superpages also makes it easy to list and manage your business listing. Along with business listings, this service also includes weather and lottery listing. It also includes a quick sign-in option through Facebook.

Here’s how: Get started setting up your Superpages listing and watch your popularity grow.

Online directories for businesses

Ranging from high-profile platforms to local listings, online directories cover a range of audiences. The method for each of them is quite similar: you submit the URL of your professional website, as well as additional details about your business or organization. These sites, in turn, incorporate this information into their data banks, ensuring that a link to your site appears when users search relevant content categories.

In addition to displaying your business name and website, these free advertising sites can improve your search engine optimization, or SEO. This helps promote your website by boosting its search engine ranking, increasing the chances that you’ll get found on Google and drawing traffic to your site.

Facebook Cover Photo and Background

Everybody sees your Facebook cover photo and background photos, so you might as well make use of them for advertising your business. Adding promotional offers, new items or new services to these image spaces will allow you to display your goods and services to a wide variety of people.

Answer Questions

When people are stuck and looking to solve their pain point, they turn up to specific forums on Internet. QnA sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers are popular places where you can find new customers. People also post their questions on Linkedin Groups.

So how can you benefit from it? Create accounts on these sites and start searching for your product or service. For example, I will search for ‘Accounting Software’ as I want to create awareness about ProfitBooks. You will get lot of questions related to your product. People might be asking about the top companies that sell this product or comparisons between different products and so on.

Start answering with the easy question and then move towards complicated questions. Again taking example of ProfitBooks, I searched for ‘Best Accounting Software‘ on Quora and got hundreds of questions around this topic. Then, I simply started answering and recommending ProfitBooks to users. We get a good amount of traffic every month via Quora.

Conclusion

How to market your business online? is one of the most important questions you need to ask before you start selling. A simple question but it could be very difficult if you are doing everything alone.
Even if you don’t have a large advertising budget, or any cash available for advertising, you can still make your presence felt on the web making use of free advertising and listings.

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