How to market your website for free!

Listed below are a few of the methods on how to market a website for free!

Marketing a website can cost a lot of money and especially if its your first time developing a website, it can be a huge risk. There are however many ways in which you can market your website for free and gain huge amounts of traffic.

Directory Submission

One of the easiest ways is to market your new website for free, is to submit the website to many directories. This method of promoting your website can take quite a lot of time but it is a very effective way of getting a steady flow of traffic to your website. It can however take some time to see the traffic from these directories because many directories check the website for quality before it is added to the list of websites.

Search Engine Submission

Search engines have been heavily used by most Internet users on a regular basis, giving website owners the potential to get good free traffic. Search engines allow users to search for a specific topics and instantly getting responses with pages that suit their search criteria. Although it can be very hard to get a good position on search engines, there are a lot of simple things that can be done:

• Back links- Getting linked from other websites
• Using Meta Tags
• Unique content
• Good simple navigation- Allows spiders and bots to navigate throughout the website easily
• Finding the right keywords with little competition for your market.

RSS Feeds

Although this isn’t exactly a way of gaining new visitors, it is a way of retaining visitors, I thought it would still be helpful to add.

If your website has constantly updating information, interested users of the website may not want to check your website all the time to see if new information has been added. Instead a RSS Feed could be set up, allowing you notify users when information of interest is added to the website. Providing this option of updating the user with different content to the website (blog, articles, forum etc) allows the users to specifically receive content relating to their specific interests.

Link exchange

Link exchange can be an extremely effective way of gaining new visitors interested in your website, if you get it right.

Firstly it is important to choose the websites that link to your website carefully. If you link exchange with a website related to dating and your website is about financial accounting, there is likely to be few visitors who will click through to your website. It is also important to check the positioning of the link. Many websites realize that it doesn’t look very good to have hundreds of links on the homepage of the website, so create a links page where they have huge lists of websites they have exchanged links with.

If you are exchanging links with a website who has a links page, it would be a bad idea to put their link in a prime position on your website as few visitors will be coming from their website. However, if you exchange with a website with large traffic and a good link position on the homepage, it is likely that they will want a better position on your website and you will gain more traffic from them in return.

It is very important also to think about the number of link exchanges you are going to be making. If you decide not to create a links page and put the links on your homepage, it can look very over crowded if many links are added and may put users off using your website again. Therefore it is a good idea to sign up to a good amount of exchanges and gradually reduce the number of exchanges dependent upon the amount of traffic that each website is sending to your website.

Forum advertising

Forums are a great way of getting your website known to a large number of people, but it can be very tricky.

It is probably best to target a smaller amount of forums to advertise on rather than a large amount. This means that you are more likely to post on these forums more frequently and users of the website will gain your trust more.

Although it may be very tempting to go to the largest forums and post as much as you can trying to get users to your website, this is actually a very inefficient way of advertising. Many forums don’t allow ‘spam’ posts and these are deleted soon after they are created by the forum staff. This gives very little exposure for the website and users are much less likely to go on the website as it is cluttering their forum with ‘spam’.

There are two ways in which you can gain exposure by posting in forums:

• Post in the forum about the subject as much as you can and put a link to your website in your signature at the bottom. Advertising in this way is less upfront and users of the forum are more likely to see your website links many times

• Go to forums and make posts about your website and why it could be of interest to users of the forum. This is a more upfront way of advertising on forums and the forum staff and users may not like it taking it as ‘spam’. It does however take little time and doesn’t involve much repeat posting.

Topsites

Topsites allow website owners to submit their website and for users of the topsites to vote for the websites, subsequently moving the website up the list. This can take along time for the website to get higher up the list as users are more inclined to use the higher rated websites, but if your website is good enough, users will quickly vote for the website and it could gain large amounts of traffic. On most topsites, they do require a link back to their website which is usually a button about 100x50 pixels in size.

All of these methods of advertising websites can help to create a large flow of steady traffic to your website, but without having a well designed website with good content your website is unlikely to gain good amounts of traffic for free.